How to make your own yummylicious peanut butter or any other nut butter

Did you ever look at a label of peanut butter and wondered why it needs all those ingredients? Well, it doesn't! It only takes two! Peanuts and a little bit of salt. The salt is necessary otherwise your butter will taste stale. It has the same impact in peanut butter as it has in bread baking. If you get the amount just right, you will not taste the salt but your butter will taste yummylicious! Two little and you have stale tasting peanut butter. And too much, well that needs no further explanation....

While the process of making your own nut butter literally only takes 5-10 minutes the preparation with cracking and peeling the nuts seems to take for ever at times. As we all love the peanut butter I get everybody to help me with this time consuming job. It is amazing what four little hands can speed up a job like this. Admittedly not all peanuts end in the food processor with little helpers like these.  But they do need a bit of an incentive to keep them going.

peanuts

peanuts ready to go into food processor

For a small jar of peanut butter you need around 250 grams of peeled peanuts. And roughly half a teaspoon of salt. Rather start with a little less, taste and add more during the process.
Pour your peanuts in your food processor. The following settings and procedure really depends on your food processor. I just mention the two different ones to demonstrate that you might have to play around a little to find the perfect setting for your set-up. So don´t get discouraged if you start and with a low setting and it doesn't work right away. Just keep going. My old one needed high speed and 10 minutes to get anywhere, my new one does a better job on medium speed (and only 5 minutes) as the bowl is to big and it just gets stuck at the side if I turn the setting too high. Your nuts will turn from little shreds to a sticky ball and finally the oils will get released and it will be a glossy shiny paste. During the process heat is released. This makes the butter a bit runny, but once it´s filled in jar and stored in the refrigerator, it is just perfect! I in general store ours in the fridge. I am not sure how well it would last at room temperature, but I might just be overcautious. I have simply never tried it. I have also never reached end of shelf life with this homemade peanut butter, simply for the fact that it will be eaten long before this.

homemade peanut butter

In organic stores you can buy peanut butter with no other additives, they usually have set in a way that all solids are at the bottom and you have all oils on top and need steering before use. I guess this is as they have been stored for a longer period of time before they are sold. I don´t get this with the homemade one. But I could imagine it happens if you store it unused for a while.

homemade peanut butter

Once you have tried homemade peanut butter you will not look back at the store bought one again!

With this method you can make any nut butter, we have also tried Macadamia butter, almond butter and hazelnut butter and one of my favourites is pumpkin seed butter. I got the idea once while looking for something for a friend that has serious sleep issues and there is a lot of tryptophan in pumpkin seeds which is used to help people with insomnia. So we made this pumpkin seed butter for plain nutritional reasons, but it turned out to be a very tasty experiment.


Now I´ll let you go and enjoy your PBJ Sandwich (or my personal favourite a peanut butter and Nutella sandwich!)