Grendel, our Blendtec blender, can make peanut butter. I tried it out with peanuts from Trader Joe's. It was good. But a pound bag of peanuts costs more than a pound jar of Trader Joe's peanut butter. That just didn't make a lot of sense somehow.
I took a vacation day yesterday (I've accumulated all the vacation I can so I had to use some lest I lose some that I would have otherwise earned) and spent some of the day shopping at Costco. They had a five pound bag of unsalted peanuts in their shells for $5.49. I decided to try my hand at making peanut butter from peanuts I shell myself.
I started out with two pounds of peanuts in their shells.
Two pounds of peanuts plus an hour and five minutes equals one pound, eight and a half ounces of shelled peanuts. If you do your arithmetic, you'll discover that this comes out to be $1.44/pound of shelled peanuts (don't consider the time it took me to shell them, time is not money!). If this turns out to be good peanut butter this will be a good value!A pound and a half of peanuts.
I took out six ounces of the peanuts and had Grendel coarsly chop them so I could add chunks to the peanut butter so we could have crunchy peanut butter.
Here is the finished product.
This is good peanut butter. We have achieved good peanut butter value! And we don't have jars that we have to recycle. We have the bag the peanuts came in that isn't recyclable. But I think that amount of petrochemicals in the bag might be less than what would be used to make another jar and to transport the jar from place to place. So I think this might be a little better for the environment than store bought stuff.Here's my latest YouTube masterpiece: Grendel Makes Peanut Butter!
I ended up with almost eight ounces of peanut shells.
Nothing goes to waste, the shells are in the compost bin.
7 comments:
Awesome! We are making lots of great fruit smoothies with Zetz.
Yum, Mei and I love peanut butter. the others don't eat it.
We have been making and freezing our own bean, rice and cheese burritos. I had been buying the ones at the P-Club, but then decided that I could make them for much less than the $1.20 or so that the frozen ones cost. We make a pot of beans, a pot of rice, and go to town with an assembly line. Great breakfast food, great lunch food, great snacks.
I make nut butters in my Quisinart, but it takes forever. I polished off the last of some walnut butter just tonight. How long did your peanut butter take? It looked really tasty!
And don't fret about the plastic bag the peanuts came in -- they're putting store-boughten peanut butter in plastic jars these days, which are more eco-unfriendly than the bag I bet.
I just re-read your comments about the plastic bag versus jars, and you can ignore my comment above. I now realize you already evaluated it.
I see now that I will have to break down and buy a new Blendtec blender. My standby cannot compete!
I'm not sure how much time it took. Each cycle takes 50 seconds and it took at least six of those. Then there's the scraping between runs. So, it takes a little time.
We had some leftover pancakes in the freezer. We ate them for breakfast to break in the peanut butter. Mmmmmm! (It probably could have used a little more salt.)
I like almond butter too. But you could make nut-butter blends and give them outlandish names--if you're into that.
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