Homemade Peanut Butter Is Not Worth It

Published on Tuesday, January 17, 2012 by Katherine

Or is it?

My boss brought a trash bag full of raw, dried peanuts to work. “I know! I’ll make homemade peanut butter!” One googled recipe and 30 minutes later, I soon found myself with a baking pan full of homemade roasted peanuts.

Alton Brown’s homemade peanut butter recipe says preparation time is only five minutes. Oh really?!

Once the peanuts were cooled, my son and I began to shell. And shell. And shell. This is what the peanuts looked like after thirty minutes of shelling:

At this point, my son noted, “I feel like one of those ladies in the shelling factory on Willy Wonka!” Indeed. Shelling peanuts takes a lot of time and rips your skin apart. And not ONE PEANUT SHELL contained a golden freaking ticket.

Forty five minutes later, we were done. If I never see another peanut again I will be happy.

Would you believe all that work only produced this?!

When one begins a recipe, one should be sure one has all the ingredients on hand. THIS one didn’t have peanut oil. OR vegetable oil. Frantically looking around the kitchen, I found a jar of hot pepper oil I made a month ago. It could work, right?

Into the Ninja Master Prep went peanuts, honey and hot pepper oil. Getting it all to blend took more than five minutes alone. Once the peanut butter was done, I determined it needed more oil. The texture was far more dry than creamy. But did I want those extra calories? Nahhh. I chose to go dryer with less fat.

The taste test? Freshly roasted peanuts. Honey. A touch of hot pepper oil. It took FAR too much time. It’s dry and I don’t want to fix it by adding more oil. It only made a sandwich sized container of homemade peanut butter. But…