my fake food blog

I made homemade peanut butter today. What did you do today, Felix Baumgartner? 

No. I didn’t ask about yesterday, I asked about today. I WIN. YOU LOSE. 

I took today and tomorrow off, so I’ve been cleaning, making bacon, egg and gouda sandwiches (…you fancy, huh?) and watching Doctor Who on DVD.

I also have a fake food project I’m working towards. Someone asked me to make peanut butter cookies, so make them I shall. Peanut butter cookies aren’t my favorite, but I found a recipe that my Gramma gave me. So, it’s on. 

And why not make the peanut butter cookie process a lot more difficult and time consuming by making the peanut butter yourself! Like a dbag! 

Honestly? I decided to make this homemade peanut butter so I could justify buying myself a full-size food processor. I’ve had a mini one up until now, but unless you’re making a tiny marinade for like…one chicken wing, it’s not really that useful of a tool. 

So, I found a recipe for Alton Brown’s homemade peanut butter on foodnetwork.com. And this is where the trouble started. 

First thing, I could NOT find peanuts in their shells anywhere. George Washington Carver, the inventor of the peanut, wept in his grave. (I also could not find a joke that works…but whatever.) Went to Whole Foods. Went to Fresh Market. Found other nuts in their shells, but no peanuts. 

I settled on unsalted, blanched peanuts, because they already had their skins removed. But I tasted them and they taste like unsalted, blanched cardboard. I had to fix this or I would have spent $12 on peanuts that I would have brought home from the store and then more than likely thrown in the garbage. 

I decided to roast the peanuts at 375 for about 15 minutes with a generous sprinkling of salt, which kind of does the trick. 

A helpful hint: When you go to take a picture of something you pulled out of the oven, don’t grab it with your bare hands. Like I did. Who do you think you are, the husband in a Frigidaire commercial? (Callback machine!) 

Anyways. Now, here’s the rest of the recipe, minus the roasting fiasco. 

Ingredients: 

• 15 oz. of roasted peanuts, shelled and skinned
• 1 tsp of kosher salt
• 1 ½ tsp of honey
• 1 ½ TB of peanut oil 

Combine peanuts, salt and honey in your food processor and process for one minute. 

And process for one minute.

…And process for one minute.

….Why won’t this damn thing turn on.

I tried a different outlet. I tried a different outlet in a different room. And then I got angry. And went upstairs and put on regular human clothes (please note, I was doing this at 5 pm) so I could leave the house and speak to people and return the broken food processor. I threw all the peanuts away, washed the food processor bowl, when my friend Katie responds to my curse-laden text about the food processor with “did you have the lid on right?” 

…No… No, I did not.

After my large slice of humble pie, I roasted a new set of peanuts and processed.

The smell of the freshly processed nuts had almost a coffee aroma to them. I had to add a bit more peanut oil than the recipe called for to get the peanut butter smooth, almost another 2 tablespoons

The results are tasty, but not the most spreadable. In his recipe, Alton Brown notes that for making peanut butter, one should use Spanish peanuts because they have a higher oil content. I don’t think I had Spanish peanuts because the texture of this peanut butter isn’t quite right. 

Jif would definitely win a beauty pageant and this peanut butter would get Miss Congeniality. (She sure is trying hard!) But there’s a really good roasted flavor with a background of saltiness. And it’s not overly sweet, which I think is nice. Not sure if I’ll bake the cookies with it yet. Maybe I’ll make one batch with it and one batch with the Jif, just to see how it turns out.

Felix Baumgartner makes history. I make peanut butter. He may have the upper hand, but mine tastes better.