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Making homemade peanut butter for Peanut Butter Lover's Day

March 1st is Peanut Butter Lover’s Day.

As a peanut butter lover, I thought I’d celebrate the day for the first time by doing something new: making my own from scratch.

The delicious final product!
The delicious final product!

It turns out that making your own peanut butter is surprisingly cheap and easy. And it tastes great. I’m a convert.

Fun fact: in 1884, a Montrealer named Marcellus Gilmore Edson was person the first to patent peanut butter. Enjoying your PB&J is clearly a very Canadian thing to do.

Peanut butter is packed with vitamin E, magnesium, potassium and vitamin B6, and has a healthy combo of fibre and protein that can help keep you full for longer. The store-bought stuff, however, typically ruins its health-food status with sugars and trans-fats.

Make your own, and you can get the most, health-wise, out of those peanuts.

You only need four ingredients to make PB at home.
You only need four ingredients to make PB at home.

Here’s how I did it:

The Recipe

Before beginning, I reviewed recipes from Alton Brown, The Kitchn and Inspired Taste. My final recipe pick: The Kitchn.

Note: Brown’s recipe includes great advice if you’re using in-shell raw peanuts. He also has a peanut-butter recipe involving a wok that looks pretty genius. And Inspired Taste has some great recipe-variation ideas, like adding almonds or cocoa powder to your peanut butter — which I will probably do with a future batch.

Find The Kitchn’s recipe I used here.

Making Peanut Butter

After roasting the peanuts for 10 minutes — the house smelled amazing — I let them cool for a few minutes and then transferred them to my food processor.

Because my food processor is a little smaller than most, I found that some of the processing times in the recipe had to have breaks halfway through — I often processed the mixture in two 30-second intervals instead of for a whole minute — so my spatula could scrape down the sides and help free the blades from getting stalled by the thick mixture. Still, it handled the nuts like a champ. (So don’t be put off by a less-than-pro appliance.)

 
 
 
 
 
 

My husband requested chunky peanut butter, so I removed about half a cup of coarsely chopped nuts early on in the process and returned them to the peanut butter at the very end. (I may have over-processed them, however, as our “chunky” peanut butter is still pretty wonderfully smooth in texture. If you like bigger chunks, go easy on the “pulse” button.)

 
 

The peanuts slowly transformed into peanut butter almost exactly as The Kitchn recipe said they would: first the mixture was dry, they clumpy, then very thick, then completely smooth.

I used peanut oil — about 1.5 Tablespoons total — but commenters have had good luck with sunflower oil, too. A teaspoon of salt and a heaping Tablespoon of honey were the only other add-ins.

Eating Peanut Butter (aka “The Best Part”)

The result: better-than-store-bought peanut butter. I’d do it again. (And will likely have to, as this stuff’s addictive.)

 
 

Store it in the refrigerator for up to several weeks — if it lasts that long.

Do you make your own peanut butter? How does your version differ than mine?