

Guess what I’m doing at 9:00 on a Sunday night?

If you guessed making homemade peanut butter, then you’d be right. (That’s what we do for a good time out here on the prairie. We’re wild like that…)

Peanut butter can actually be a very healthy food. That is, when it’s made with healthy fats and no refined sugars. Unfortunately, your typical-everyday-choosy-moms-choose-it brand of peanut butter is seriously lacking in that department. I have a jar of that certain brand of peanut butter sitting before me as we speak. The ingredients are:

Roasted peanuts (no problems there), sugar (eh, not great, but ok), molasses (ok), fully hydrogenated rapeseed and soybean oils (Yikes!), mono and digyclerides (don’t know what these are, but they don’t sound good), and salt.

Full disclosure: I don’t always make homemade peanut butter– sometimes I just buy it. However, knowing how to make your own homemade nut butters is a delicious skill to have.

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How to Make Peanut Butter

You will need:

Thoroughly process the peanuts in a food processor or high-powered blender until they are finely chopped. (This is the food processor I have. LOVE it.)

While the processor is running, stream in a bit of olive oil. You may have to turn off the processor for a minute, remove the lid and scrap the bottom of the bowl in order to make sure everything is incorporated well enough.

Next, stream in the honey in the same manner, if desired.

And you’re done!

Kitchen Notes:

You could totally start out with raw peanuts and roast them yourself. Here’s a tutorial.

A lot of folks make homemade peanut butter without adding any extra oil. Depending on how fresh your peanuts are, this may work for you– but you’ll need to process the nuts for a while longer to make this work.

Don’t like peanuts? No problem! Use this same technique to create other nut butters instead. (Almonds, cashews, etc)

You will need to store your homemade peanut butter in the fridge, since it’s not hydrogenated like the store-bought stuff. It won’t last for years on the shelf like the commercial peanut butters do, but I doubt it will have a chance to be around for that long anyway.

Your homemade peanut butter recipe should last at least a couple weeks in the fridge, if not longer.

Can you imagine a PB&J made with homemade peanut butter, homemade chokecherry jelly or strawberry jam, and freshly baked bread?

THAT my friends, would be one heck of a sandwich.