Homemade Peanut Butter
The other day I got the hair brained idea to make my own peanut butter. I really do like making my own things. I make my own laundry soap, I make gravy and sauces from scratch, I like to bake, etc etc. So the leap into homemade peanut butter didn’t seem like a big deal. Besides that, with the recent Salmonella scare in peanut butter and the fact that it usually contains a ton of bug parts, I thought making my own was a good idea.
The recipe is quite simple; you need peanuts and peanut oil. I have seen recipes using no oil, but honey or butter instead. Sounds like that would also be good.
I started with a 5 lb. bag of whole roasted peanuts from Costco, what can I say, I was ambitious! I was looking for raw peanuts, but couldn’t find them. I did have a lady who works at a bird store say she could get it for me, but I gave up waiting and went shopping instead. If I lived closer to a Whole Foods or Henry’s, I probably could have bought them in bulk there. But I live in the sticks with non of those modern conveniences.
Me and Mr. A. started shelling (shucking?) peanuts. It didn’t take long for that to become really old. Shelling peanuts, I have discovered, is a pain in the ass. Really. After about two hours of shelling, this is what we had:
I should have used a smaller bowl (remember, I said I was ambitious!), it would have seemed like more peanuts.
After two hours, my thumb hurt. Come to think of it, my thumb still hurts today. So I didn’t shell any more peanuts. I measured it out and I had exactly 2 cups of peanuts.
You’re basically supposed to just put the peanuts in a food processor, gradually add a little oil, and viola! Peanut Butter. But, as you can see, I have an old crappy food processor. I actually have two, old crappy food processors. Neither one of them worked very well.
So, I started processing the peanuts. It didn’t work. My blades of this old food processor just spun round and round, doing absolutely nothing. So then I transferred the peanuts into my other food processor. Same thing. Sonofabitch. I told you it was a pain in the ass! So finally, I transferred the peanuts into my blender. And finally….peanut butter! Behold, my beautiful homemade peanut butter!
Yeah, not real impressive is it? I didn’t think so either. (BTW, that’s a small glad container that I bought with lunch meat in it…so you can know how small it is).
In conclusion, making homemade peanut butter is a lot of work. If you are really concerned about the bugs, you could always buy a jar of no-shell peanuts and save a lot of time. But they aren’t cheap so I don’t think it would be cost effective. In all I spent about $8.00 on supplies ($2 something for the oil and $5 something for the bag of nuts). I still need to finish making the entire 5 lb bag of nuts. Or maybe I’ll just let the kids eat them. Good thing they like peanuts!
LOL. I think I’ll have my kids do the shelling.