Making Homemade Peanut Butter from Homegrown Peanuts

Last year we told you about planting a new crop in the garden in This Post. Schronce's Deep Black Peanuts.  It was the first time that we've planted peanuts and Benjamin and I were excited about it. Since we were unfamiliar with growing peanuts, I researched and got some bad information on when to harvest and I explained it in This Post and showed our sad little yield of peanuts.  Jimmy Carter, I am not!

Anyway, after drying them, I brought them inside and have stored them.  The other night while shelling pecans in front of the fireplace, I remembered the peanuts and figured that tonight was the night that we would roast them.  Roasting peanuts is simple.  Simply heat an oven to 350 degrees and put the peanuts on a tray for 20 - 25 minutes, stirring every so often.  Our house was filled with the most appetizing aroma ever!

Peanuts roasting in the oven

Remove from the oven and cool completely.  We decided that we wanted to make our own Roasted Peanut Butter!  To do so, you need to crack open the shells and remove the peanuts.  You can see why this variety is called Shronce's Deep Black Peanuts - they are black versus red like normal peanuts.

To make peanut butter, you want to remove the skins of the peanuts.  This is easy. Just rub between your fingers and the black skins come off leaving a golden brown, roasted peanut.

We have some skin in the game

Benjamin helped me and when we were done, we had a small bowl of skinless, boneless, roasted peanuts ready to be processed.

Future Peanut Butter

We were left with a tray of peanut shells and skins and we'll compost this.  We compost most everything, putting all organic material back into the soil, ensuring that we're returning as much nutrients that we're removing each crop year so we're never at a deficit.

To the compost pile

My mom taught me the following song when I was a little boy that I'm sure she learned from her mom:

A peanut sat on a railroad track,

His heart was all a-flutter.

The five-fifteen came rushing by--

Toot toot!   Peanut butter!

Instead of using a train, we're going to use another device to make peanut butter. We don't have fancy equipment - just a simple Black & Decker food processor and we'll make use of that to make our peanut butter.

Pour the peanuts in

We turn it on an pulse continuously for a minute.  The peanuts look sort of like coarse ground grits at this point.

Then we pulse for another minute.  Now the peanuts are starting to 'clump' together. Almost, but not quite peanut butter.

We pulse for another minute and then we scrape down the sides and add a teaspoon of honey and a sprinkling of kosher salt.

Honey & Salt added

We pulse that for another minute and then use a rubber spatula to scrape the processor clean and into a bowl for consuming.  Due to our small harvest, we could have probably sat around in front of the fireplace with spoons and finished it off, but it was so good, we wanted to ration it.

Homemade Peanut Butter - the finished product!

We snacked in front of the roaring fireplace on the richly flavored, smooth, roasted peanut butter and when we each had several spoonfuls, I sat it on the counter next to the 48 ounce container of pecans I had just shelled.

Hmmmm.....

And had an idea.  If peanut butter is this delicious, what if we roasted pecans and processed them to make Roasted Pecan Butter???  Hmmmmm...  Standby for a future post about that project.  It's on the list of things to do!