I’m Never Buying Peanut Butter (or Roasted Nuts) Again!

There have been a few times in our journey to self-reliance when I decide to learn something new and sit back in shock, wondering why everyone doesn’t do <whatever I’m learning about>. Making my own peanut butter is one of them. After yesterday, I’m never buying peanut butter or roasted nuts again.

Last Christmas, I had the bright idea of making peanut brittle. My mom used to make it all the time and we loved it! Well, that never happened so the 24 ounces (pound and a half) of raw Spanish Nuts (cocktail peanuts) sat on in the cupboard for 6 months. I don’t remember what I paid for them but I do recall they were on sale at a local grocery store. Yesterday, I was moving stuff around, found them, and decided that I was going to do something with them. I didn’t mean to make peanut butter, I was just going to roast them with a little salt. One thing lead to another.

I Google’d how to roast them up and learned that to get rid of the skins, boiling them for a few minutes would help. I blanched them in boiling water for about 3 minutes. I should have gone longer but a lot of the skins did come off. It was a little more time consuming than I wanted to originally spend but worth it in the end. Isn’t that how it usually works? 😉

After cleaning them up a bit, I put a light coating of olive oil over them so the seasoning would stick. I decided to make a salt-and-pepper batch and a garlic salt batch. As I was separating them out, I wondered about making peanut butter and looked that up after I put the first cookie sheet in the oven at 350 degrees. Set the timer to 15 minutes and turned to my trusty laptop to learn more.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! Why haven’t I ever done this before?! Making peanut butter is as simple as taking raw or roasted nuts, running them through a food processor until you have the desired consistency, and you’re done. You have made a basic peanut butter. That is pretty much how you make all nut butters. The roasting gives them a ‘nuttier’ flavor and helps bring out the natural oils. Some people will add a little sugar or a pinch of salt to theirs but that is more for taste than need. So, to recap how to many peanut butter:

1. Take raw or roasted peanuts.
2. Place into food processor. Hit frappe’ (or whatever higher setting you have available)
3. Stop and scrape off the sides and frappe’ again until the peanut butter is the consistency you want.
4. Store in an airtight container. Can be refrigerated or frozen if desired.

There is a lot of debate out there about how long it will last, whether it needs to be refrigerated or not, how many cups or ounces will yield ‘X amount’ of peanut butter, and raw vs roasted being more healthy for you. Measurements also seem to vary a lot but I was able to find a general consensus. I also did the math to see what kind (if any) savings there were by doing it myself.

General Peanut Butter Information

• A cup of shelled, raw nuts is about 6 ounces.
• 2 cups of raw or roasted nuts will yield a cup of peanut butter.
• Peanut butter does not ‘need’ to be refrigerated unless kept in a very warm house.
• The oils will separate over time but a simple stir puts it right back to normal.
• Peanut butter can go bad however, the time varies so much due to variables in climates and temperatures, it is best to simply pay attention to your own batch. Peanut butter should last unrefrigerated, even in a warmer location, for at least a few months.

The Number Crunch

I used the Spanish peanuts which made a good peanut butter but isn’t the one recommended plus, they are more expensive. When I went looking for raw peanuts, I was thrilled with what I found! You can get ten pounds of raw peanuts, shelled and from Virginia for less than $30 and free shipping! That works out to about $0.19 an ounce or $1.14 a cup.

To make 12 ounces of peanut butter, you would need 24 ounces of peanuts which works out to about 4 cups. That works out to $4.56. I know there are places you can get cheap peanut butter but here, in Southeast Alaska? A 12 ounce jar of Skippy is around $6. You can get the large, 4 pound tubs of generic Safeway brand peanut butter for $14-ish. Technically, it would be cheaper to buy it from Safeway but here’s the thing:

I don’t want all that sugar, different oils, and preservatives in there. I want peanut butter, plain and simple. Plus, by doing it myself, I know exactly how it was processed not to mention, I know how to make my own nut butters now and that is a skill not many have. Yes, it is an incredibly simple one but to be honest, most of the stuff I have been learning about IS easy. The trade off to doing it yourself is it costs you time instead of more money. Do it yourself, save money, right? That is what the Home Depot’s motto is! They leave an important part of the benefits out though: to do it yourself, you need the skills or the ability to learn the skills you need. That is what moves the DIY’r from the red and into the green.

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So why keep making my own if I end up spending more money? Seems backwards, right? When you take that same $30 dollar, 5 pound bag of peanuts and simply roast them up for a tasty treat – the numbers change dramatically. To buy 5 pounds of lightly salted cocktail peanuts from the local Walmart would cost you more than the bag of peanuts did. You are saving $12-15 by doing it yourself. You could get roasted, unsalted peanuts that you would just have to shell first as an alternative, too (though the savings aren’t as high).

We have no Costco here and though I could buy the stuff from their online store, the shipping would kill off any savings. Amazon is king in the rural places of Alaska and no self respecting Alaskan would ever skip the Prime membership. I order so much from there that I usually get my $99 back from saved shipping within the first 4 months of the year!

For us, we will be getting the raw peanuts and portioning them into vacuum sealed bags and storing them in a cool, dry place and taking them out as needed. With the price of peanut, almond, and other butters going up steadily – I am glad I learned about it now and will be adding some to our stocks. Hooray for learning more ‘cooking’ from scratch.

Now….please excuse me while I go have homemade peanut butter on homemade bread and homemade berry jam. It’s good to be a homesteader!