Homeless in Vancouver: Nutty but good—the peanut butter McFlurry!

On a recent spring morning I found myself comparing the sweetened and emulsified peanut butter that I get with breakfasts in McDonald's to the soft serve ice cream that comes in a McFlurry.

I started out wondering if the two might have similar proportions of salt, sugar, and fat. But I just ended up wanting to find out what they tasted like together.

So I put aside four peanut butter packets from two McDonald’s Big Breakfasts and Wednesday evening (April 6) I ordered a regular size McFlurry with no toppings.

Scooping out each of the four little portion packs and manually mixing the peanut butter in with the soft vanilla ice cream was fiddly work but I managed to do it without making too much of a mess. Actually, the two ingredients combined very nicely.

The resulting McFlurry had a thick, ice-creamy consistency that was velvety on the tongue and tasted as good as I thought it would. I can’t say that it was better than a baked pie McFlurry but peanut butter certainly does go with vanilla ice cream!

Admittedly, McDonald’s peanut butter and McDonald’s soft serve ice cream together make for a very rich and intensely sweet confection—perhaps a bit too sweet.

Organic peanut butter (sans extra sugar or salt) might give an even better result, with more flavour and less sugar. Probably still very rich though. I think that’s  just the nature of mixing peanut butter and vanilla ice cream.

As I noted at the top, there really isn’t much equivalence between the composition of smooth peanut butter and soft ice cream.

One hundred grams of smooth peanut butter has about 17 milligrams of sodium, 9 milligrams of sugar, and a whopping 50 grams of fat, while the same volume of soft ice cream has over three times as much sodium (61 milligrams), over twice as much sugar (21 grams), but surprisingly, less than a third as much fat (13 grams).

The calories per 100 grams of smooth peanut butter and soft ice cream are 588 versus 222. And the same 100-gram volume of smooth peanut butter and soft ice cream has 25 grams and 4.1 grams of protein, respectively.