How to Make Peanut Butter: It’s Much Easier Than You’d Think

I am very excited. The Boyfriend and I have made our own peanut butter.

I wasn’t going to tell you about this, but a post in today’s Guardian about a brand of ready-made pesto being not quite all was cracked up to be and extolling the virtue of whisking up a few easy items prompted me to do so.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I eat too much processed food any more but then when you add in things like condiments you realise actually there’s more ready-made stuff going into your system than you might like.

The peanut butter experiment began when The Boyfriend was surfing online during Homeland….’ooh look,’  he exclaimed. ‘Here’s how you make peanut butter.’

Next thing I know, Carrie’s on pause – in full crying face – and we’re in the car to the late-night supermarket to purchase what I calculated to be 3000 calories of peanuts – at this point, I nearly cried.

There is going to be something in my fridge of 3000 calories and I don’t have any willpower. I spent the next 10 minutes muttering the ‘it’s healthy fat’ mantra.

How to Make Peanut Butter

Seriously, it couldn’t be easier!

1) Purchase two large packs of peanuts. This is bad for willpower I know, but we figured anything less would just whizz ineffectually around the food processor. (best I check out this piece on portion sizes next)

2) If you like crunchy peanut butter open one packet of peanuts, place half in food processor, whizz quickly so they are small peanutty pieces. Tip out of blender

3) Now place the rest of the peanuts in the blender and simply let it whizz for 5 minutes. It will go through various transformations including looking like a cheesecake base, looking like dough and then at some point around 4 minutes in, it starts to look like peanut butter.

4) Turn off the blender, add the peanut pieces, blend again for a few seconds to mix them in – now put the result in a jar. If you taste it now it’s hot – that’s really weird. Leave it in the fridge to cool and voila, peanut butter.

The above is the finished product; I know, why, why, why am I not a food stylist, it’s a question I ask myself every day!

What Does Homemade Peanut Butter Taste Like?

It doesn’t exactly taste like the stuff you buy on the shelf, it’s less sweet because most processed peanut butters actually have some sugar and salt added.

In terms of calories, I’m having to guesstimate, but I reckon we made about 350g of peanut butter for 3000 calories.

The pot of supermarket peanut butter I have here contains just 2108 so sadly our one isn’t a winner on that score.

I find that interesting as I would have expected it to have fewer calories… but I suppose it’s because they add sugar so weight for weight the energy is less.

It was a lot more fun to make it though than just buy it in the shop.

Oh, and if you like all things peanutty, and don’t care about the whole processed food issue – in the USofA – they now have powdered peanut butter. You just add water to make it the real stuff (with waaaay less calories). But is this as healthy as making your own – check out our analysis on powdered peanut butter.

Animal images: freedigitalphotos.net

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