The Quest for the Perfect Peanut Butter

Our quest for acceptable peanut butter has led to us inextricably towards making our own from (relatively) fresh ingredients.

Here are the peanuts with which we've had the most success.
We tried peanuts out of the 'bulk' bins but they turned out to be too stale and produced poor tasting and dry peanut butter. One of these packages will produce about 1 small jar. It turns out though that we can only find vacuum packed peanuts in anything above a single size serving at one store - sometimes. Product stocking is spotty at best. (But that is a topic for a different blog entry.)

These are what the peanuts look like in a food processor. (Fascinating, we know.)

The next step is to turn on the food processor and let it process... and process... and process...

After about 3 minutes the peanuts start to break up and look a lot like this. (You may notice a strong resemblance to a bowl full of broken peanut bits cause this is what they are.)
Letting it go for another 5 minutes or so turns it into finer pieces of broken peanuts and a little bit of peanut oil. This is the start of the thick paste stage.

If you let it keep going for another 2ish minutes (which you really want to do because it is not so nice to eat at the previous stage) the new thickness of this stuff caused by the release of the oils causes the goop to stick together and start rolling around the bowl in a ball. Its very fun to watch. See the ball?


Now we are getting close to the end.
Let the thing keep on going (by this point the motor should be getting so hot you are worried about its health) and the ball of peanut gooeyness will break down into something that finally resembles peanut butter. Mmmm.

At this point we have started adding a little bit of cinnamon and brown sugar. We're not sure we can taste the difference, but they seem like the right stuff to add.


After a little more mixing it is time to pour the warm (gotta love the heat transfer from the motor) peanut butter into our glass peanut butter jars. Then, because Michael prefers crunchy style, we add the last ingredient - partially crushed peanuts! The whole thing then gets stirred up together and after a measly 20 minutes of effort we have enough peanut butter to last us... um... well, maybe a week.

We've started making 2 or 3 batches at once in a effort to increase the time between peanut butter production times. The result, however, is that we seem to be eating more peanut butter, and still run out once a week.