Homemade Peanut Butter

Every now and then Granny sends us peanuts, and recently gave us a rather large bag of raw peanuts. Since I don't particularly enjoy snacking on raw peanuts and can only eat so many roasted ones, I thought we should get creative to make sure they didn't go to waste. So in what form do I consume the most peanuts by far? Peanut butter! I love peanut butter.

After a little research online it turns out making peanut butter with a food processor is super easy - just throw skinned roasted peanuts in with some salt and process until it's peanut butter. We followed this guide which really breaks things down, but I'll give a simplified overview here.

The first step is to roast the peanuts if they aren't already. We're not sure how many peanuts we used, except that they covered a 13x9 pan, which about filled our food processor with peanuts and filled a pint jar with peanut butter. We tossed the peanuts in peanut oil and toasted them at 350 for about 10 minutes. We probably should have done some research on skinning them; we did so after the roasting which was messy and time-consuming.


As we skinned them we loaded them into the food processor. We would process it in 1-2 minute intervals, stirring in between and adding salt as needed (one can optionally add additional flavors or sweeteners).

At the beginning it will be crumbly,

then it gets smoother,

and then really smooth (although partly from the food processor running so much and heating it up, I think).

At this point it's creamy enough to just pour into the jar.

And then you have a perfect jar of homemade peanut butter! We keep it in the refrigerator and haven't noticed any separation like you see with the natural peanut butter from the store. I'm not sure if this is due to low oil content, different peanuts, or refrigeration. It tastes delicious, and provided we can keep on getting peanuts, I see no reason to buy peanut butter any more!