Peanut butter… uh, peanut butter time.

We tried a few peanut butters here but nothing even holds a candle to Adam’s/Laura Scudder’s natural peanut butters. Which of course we can’t get here. It’s a Smucker’s brand so no presence down under. Everything either has sugar or emulsifiers in it, and the natural food store peanut butters have no salt and aren’t quite oily/spreadable enough for our tastes.

Sad us.

So I got the bright idea to make my own. We can get peanuts (salted-roasted and very tasty) at the bulk store for around $9/kg. So $4.50ish a pound. Ehh. It’s ok. This peanut butter isn’t actually significantly cheaper, or more expensive for that matter, than what we can buy in the store. It just tastes waaaaay better.

You will need:

Peanuts!

I bought a lot this time. 3kg! We have some left over for next time. I possibly used about half of what I bought.

Peanut oil

I’d estimate for the amount of peanut butter I made I used around 1 cup of oil? That would put it at around 1/4 cup per jar batch? Not entirely sure since I just pour it in…

A food processor

You can see I thought of taking pictures after I had already started…

So here is what you do.

Take your container you plan to keep your peanut butter in. Fill it with peanuts.

This is a 500gm (1 poundish) jar. This is pretty much the biggest jar peanut butter comes in around here. Crazy!

Empty two containers full into your food processor

I have a little food processor (it’s a blender food processor combo. Note: a blender will also work for making peanut butter but will be a bit trickier to deal with), and I can fit 2 jars of peanuts into it. Add some peanut oil and start blending.

You can add the oil before you start (and you should add some before you start) or after you start blending it. You don’t want soup and in fact your peanut butter should start piling to one side and looking like this after a minute or two of blending:

This means it’s done. If you want crunchy peanut butter with actual chunks you can chop some peanuts and mix them into this by hand. Personally, although I am a huge fan of the crunchy stuff I find this consistency just fine.

I made this much today

These little jars (Sanitarium brand, yes that’s really the name of the company!) originally ran us about $4-5 at the store and the peanut butter tasted vaguely of Crisco due to emulsifiers (no stir additives). This amount is about 2kg of peanut butter and will last us a few months.

There was much finger licking involved in the production of this post.