I decided to try to make some.
Steph picked up two kilos of peanuts the other week when she went to town. For those of you who don’t use the metric system, did you know peanuts are super high in protein?
The first step is to roast the peanuts until they are golden brown. You can roast them in the oven or on the stove in a skillet. You can’t roast them over an open fire. These aren’t chestnuts, you know.
After you have them roasted, you need to remove the skins. You will want to wait until the peanuts cool a bit as they were just in the oven or skillet at 400-500 degrees. That may seem like common sense, but the majority of people in my house yelped after grabbing the piping hot peanuts straight off the cookie sheet.
Removing the skins turned out to be the most difficult part. The most effective way is to remove the skins one peanut at a time. That is not the most efficient way.
We tried rolling them against each other in a colander and then in a glass jar. That got most of the skins off, but a bunch refused to let go. How would you get peanut skins off?
With a percentage of peanuts skinned, I moved to the next step, which was grinding the nuts. Most recipes recommend processing the peanuts first without other ingredients; however, we do not have a food processor. We do have a blender.
When I’d made a Nutella-like spread a few weeks back, the nuts didn’t want to blend up smoothly and kept bogging down our blender. With that in mind, I added the vegetable oil and brown sugar first, one-quarter cup each per kilo. I also put in a splash of vanilla extract and a dash of salt.
I added a handful of peanuts as the skins came off and kept the blender going the whole de-skinning process. This took many minutes, enough minutes that I finally gave up on having skin-free peanuts. Into the blender went the rest.
The skins blended up pretty well, but they were very dark and toasty tasting. The only ill effect we had was a darker flavoring to the peanut butter.
The whole process took a bit over an hour. That’s really not too bad, I think. The butter didn’t thicken up like store bought stuff from the States. If we had used something like palm shortening or coconut oil, it would have thickened more when cooled.
The children and Steph love peanut butter on pancakes. I don’t. But I do enjoy peanut butter cookies like my Granny makes. I decided to make a batch to try out the homemade peanut butter.
They turned out beautifully. The flavor was lovely, and the texture was great. I’ll be making peanut butter again in the future–but someone please tell me how to get the skins off!
Juan David 