Homemade Peanut Butter – so easy you won’t believe it
I have two kids (5 and 18 months), a husband, and a full-time job in high-tech marketing, so I’m a little busy. But since I’ve never been one who knows when to say enough already, I also blog about food and family over at Steph Cooks, and now I’m here!
Anyway, about that peanut butter. It all started when our old blender died. And by died I mean the bottom part literally fell out of the top part, spraying smoothie everywhere.
Big sad face.
What started as a sad face quickly turned into a happy one for me though, because I realized that this meant we could go New Appliance Shopping. New Appliance Shopping is definitely in my top five list of favorite things. I convinced my smoothie-loving husband that we needed something better than that old Chef Style (win!), but neither of us wanted to shell out the scratch for a Vitamix.
Enter the Ninja.
Via the Ninja website
It was $140 and I’ll tell you, this sucker is worth every penny. The first thing we did with it was blend up some ice just to see what we were dealing with. Within a couple of minutes we had snow. Which would’ve been perfect if we had had snowcone syrup, but we didn’t plan that far ahead.
After watching the Ninja pulverize ice, I wondered if I could make peanut butter. The natural stuff you buy in the store is just peanuts and salt. How hard could it be?
Recommended for You
Not hard at all. Seriously. Normally when I find myself saying “How hard could it be?” I end up working for months on a sourdough starter that was only supposed to take a week to make, or spending an entire evening making chicken noodle soup from scratch, including the stock, because surely it can’t take that long, right?
But I digress. This was remarkably, ridiculously easy. Here’s the recipe, which I feel a little ridiculous calling a recipe because there’s not much to it.
Homemade Peanut Butter
1 3/4 lb unsalted, shelled peanuts
5/8 tsp salt
Throw ingredients in blender. Blend for about 5 minutes, stopping to scrape down the sides. At first it’ll look dry and crumbly, but soon you’ll see it start to turn into peanut butter. Just keep blending until all you have is this gorgeousness:
Come to mama.
You could totally do this in a food processor. I made it about a week ago and put all the fresh PB in a quart Mason jar, and there has been no oil separation at all – it looks just like it did the day I made it. This was also a huge hit with my 5-year-old, who couldn’t believe you could actually make peanut butter. I think he thinks everything grows on trees unless told otherwise.
Give it a shot! You’ll save money over buying organic and/or natural PB, and impress your kids at the same time. Win/win.
