Difficulty: Easy
Time: 20 mins to roast nuts, 10 mins to process
Plastic saved per year: about 12 1kg plastic containers
What’s the catch?: For this to be completely plastic-free, you’ll need to buy the peanuts from a bulk food store – and fill your own container.

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You have possibly never thought of peanut butter as miraculous.  Fair enough, neither had I until I made my own.

There are a couple of miracles in fact.  The first is that the ingredients needed to make peanut butter are: peanuts.  Just peanuts, nothing else.  It is a common misconception that oil is added as the finished product is clearly oily, but no.  The oil you see is peanut oil released from the nuts during processing.

The second miracle is that a pile of dry-looking nuts can transform into a decidedly wet-looking butter.  And the first time you try it, I can promise you will be incredulous.

The process in simple enough: roast the peanuts, allow them to cool, then process until they turn into peanut butter.  Job done.  The trick is to have patience as the peanuts-to-peanut-butter transformation does not occur instantly, in fact it takes about 10 minutes.   When processing, the peanuts first turn into a meal-like consistency.  Then they are more like breadcrumbs, but still dry and very unlike butter. At this point you are likely to feel quite skeptical, but keep going!  It is such an unlikely process that you can scarcely believe it possible, but if you keep the processor on and just wait, magic happens.

From peanuts to peanut butter in pictures

After roasting, allow your peanuts to cool.  Then get your helper to transfer them to the food processor.

At first all you get is crumbled peanuts.

Looking better now, but still not there.

Almost…..

And done!  Now to add some crunch…

To make crunchy peanut butter, add some peanuts you reserved for this purpose.

Pulse and few times…et voila!  Crunchy Peanut Butter.

In the jar….

…and back to my helper for quality testing.

Recipe

1kg raw blanched peanuts

Roast peanuts in a baking dish at 180C for about 30 mins, or until lightly browned, stiring occasionally.  The longer your roast the nuts, the darker your finished peanut butter will be.  Allow to cool.

If you like your peanut butter crunchy reserve half a cup of roasted nuts.  Put the rest in the food processor and process on high until the peanut butter forms.  This will take about 10 minutes.

Add in the reserved nuts and pulse a few times until the desired level of crunchiness is achieved.

Spread thickly on fresh bread and enjoy.