Does The Mason Jar Lid Reuse Hack Hold Water? We Tried It Out

I have long been trying to establish a rule in my household, and in the way of rules everywhere, it hasn't quite caught on yet. It is a simple rule: Any glass jar kept out of the recycling, and to be reused in the household, should be compatible with standard Mason jars. That is, it should be designed so that one of the two sizes of Mason jar lids will fit on it properly and, most likely, not accidentally.

The notion is to avoid the all-too-common lid/container matching game. We all know that, through attrition or entropy, more and more of these containers and lids are lost to the land of wayward socks, and eventually nothing fits anything else. But if everything were compatible in the first place, that problem would be avoided.

But now there's a new wrinkle — even before I've ironed out my old ones. Very excited, or perhaps excitable, persons on TikTok and elsewhere have discovered that all manner of other lids will fit Mason jars: various nut butters, for example, and a particular size of shaker top from what passes for Parmesan cheese. Before I convened a body of me, myself, and I to evaluate this hack and consider modifying the universally ignored Mason compatibility law, I thought I should look into this claim. Do these lids actually fit and, if so, do I really need to keep and reuse the 200 or so peanut butter lids my household consumes in an average week? If you're in need of lids — perhaps you got overly crafty and repurposed all your old Mason jar lids around your home and garden – this might prove useful.

Since peanut butter lids will never be in short supply around here, I had lids to test out, but TikToker @courtduhknee complicated things by adding that the Parmesan lids fit, as do Nutella lids. While I don't hold the salty sawdust cheese substitute in high regard, no one has to tell me twice to buy Nutella (or even once, really, but unfortunately my wife has rules of her own). So, off I went to the grocery to buy Nutella and, explaining carefully to cashiers and fellow shoppers that it was for a friend, Kraft Parmesan cheese. I rejected the 13-ounce jar of Nutella because its lid clearly wouldn't fit either jar, and opted for the 26.5-ounce size on the principle that it's always better to buy twice as much Nutella.

Perhaps this is a good time to talk about Mason jar lid sizes. It won't take long, because there are only two of them: regular and wide-mouth. This is a brilliant move on the part of Newell Brands, which owns Ball and Kerr, the purveyors of Mason jars in the U.S. So, in a Nutella shell, any product lid that wishes to fit a Mason jar must fit one of these two sizes.

I had on hand Simply Nature peanut butter and Trader Joe's almond butter in 16-ounce jars, and a 28-ounce jar of Kirkland peanut butter from Costco. This, I felt, gave me a reasonable number of options to indicate how likely any such jar lid is to fit a Mason jar.

It is, of course, not sufficient that one should attempt to screw on a lid and pronounce it fitting. Anyone who's ever owned a garden hose knows that matching threading is no guarantee of anything, and since @courtduhknee promised a water-tight fit, I resolved to test this out as well by filling quart Mason jars — one fitting a regular lid and the other a wide-mouth lid — with water. I thought about windmilling them around in my kitchen, guitar god-style, to help along any leakage with centripetal force. But again, my wife has some rules. Instead, I screwed the lids on tightly and set them on their sides on a tea towel to see if there was any drippage. In retrospect, it's not clear what I was hoping to accomplish with the tea towel. If anything, the absorbent cloth would make it harder to see leakage, and the increased surface area would make any spilled water evaporate more quickly.

Incidentally, @courtduhknee noted that straws fit neatly in the Parmesan shaker holes, turning a glass Mason jar from a terrible choice for a poolside beverage into merely a poor choice. Mine is a land of many straws, and all of them — stainless steel and plastic — fit the Parmesan cap except for the large-caliber straws used for boba tea.

On the whole, I'd say this was a partial success at best. The Trader Joe's almond butter and Simply Nature (an Aldi organic-ish store brand) lids fit the regular-mouth jar, but immediately leaked when subjected to the water windmill... err, I mean, the tip-over test. The Kirkland peanut butter and, sadly, Nutella lids were slightly too small for the wide-mouth jars. The Kraft Parmesan cap fit snugly on the regular-mouth jar, and there was no need to test its water-tightness since the flip-top lid isn't water-tight anyway.

I also tried a variety of official Ball and Kerr Mason jar lids on the plastic jars. There is an astonishing variety of such lids for upgrading your glass jars, and we have a few — lids vented for fermenting, lids perforated for straws, reusable one-piece plastic lids, and others. As expected, the lids worked on the Trader Joe's, Simply Nature, and Kraft plastic jars, but not on the others. Other than poolside, where glass is inadvisable, I'm not sure when this particular arrangement would be beneficial, but upcycling compatible lids and plastic jars is not a bad idea. Having a standard container size around the house is an honorable — some might say noble, wise, and unconventionally humorous — goal. Keep in mind that I only tried a few of the innumerable brands of peanut butter lids, and those were the contrary sort where the oil separates from whatever the not-oil is. You might have better luck with Jiffy. And either way, you can always do the carton top hack to turn mason jars into even more useful storage.