DIY Peanut Butter – is it worth it?
It’s raining. There are no surprises there – we’re deep into winter. So far today we’ve had 36.1mm of liquid sunshine. Obviously, there hasn’t been any gardening, which would be silly – I’m not a duck. So, to keep the gardening spirit alive, I need to look for garden related things to do indoors, and this is where I can thank my procrastination superpowers.
Ages ago, back on the 9th of May I dug up my peanuts, washed and dried them and promised I’d make peanut butter out of them. And then they sat there, patiently waiting for a day like today. But the story goes back even further to an optimistic day last year.
Sometime in early September I popped eight raw peanuts, from the baking aisle in the supermarket into seed raising mix in the warmth and safety of the greenhouse. I watered carefully – not too much so they’d rot but enough to awaken the magic within. I’m learning to trust my frost-free environment and tentatively go a little earlier than the safely expected planting date in late October that my frost prone neighbours need to abide by. I also have a soil thermometer and the knowledge that they like the soil to be at least 18ºC. In the ideal conditions, I planted six peanut seedlings and held back two for just in case. It might look silly at the time of planting but in a 1m x 1.5m bed I put six plants. By the end of the season, they’d spread to fill the space.
They also like their soil to be light, free draining and rich in organic material, but so do most of the other vegetables I have growing. Although I have the soil I have, and they do seem to like it, I enrich it with some compost, blood and bone and my favourite Yates Dynamic Lifter which is an organic, slow release, pelletised chicken manure with all sorts of other beneficial goodies added in. As legumes, they can sort out their own nitrogen needs.
And then we wait. It has to be one of the lowest maintenance crops in the garden. All I really need to do is keep the weeds at bay and make sure the soil doesn’t dry out – but I’ve got irrigation for that. The waiting takes quite a while. In the meantime, the plant does its strange little thing and after its bright yellow flowers, it sends stalks called pegs into the soil so the peanuts can develop underground. Eventually, nine months later, the leaves lose their vitality and fade to yellow. This is the sign to dig them up and marvel at what has taken place.
And now we pick up our rainy-day story with our clean and dry peanuts. Shelling is easy enough, you don’t need a nutcracker, but it can be a little hard on soft fingers. Then I popped them in the air fryer set to 160ºC, for about 12 minutes. Every 4 minutes I stopped to give the air fryer pan a shake and tested a peanut or two for that roasted peanut crunch.
Once I hit that sweet spot, I moved them into my blender and whizzed them up and managed to get a nice crumb before it became a little too much effort for the poor wee thing. So, I moved it across to my bullet mixer to finish the job. At this point you just need to trust the process because for a while there I thought it would never happen and then suddenly it did. I determined the end point with two questions: can I spread it? And does it stick to the roof of my mouth? At this point a pinch of salt doesn’t go amiss.
I optimistically sterilised four small jars in the oven on 100ºC, but it turned out I only needed one jar, but it is one jar of the nicest peanut butter I’ve ever had – you can taste the love and effort! We shall be using it sparingly over the next week or so – you can’t go to all that effort and then eat it in one sitting – that just feels wrong.
But if we crunch the numbers:
- There were 241 days or 34 weeks of growing.
- Six peanuts weighing 3g gave 300g peanut butter.
- 300g of peanut butter in the store costs $8.00 for the organic version, so if I were squirreling my money away to save up for a jar of peanut butter, I would need to pop 23 and a half cents into my piggy bank each week.
In the grand scheme of things, it hardly seems worth it, but you can’t put a value on home grown goodness or the experience. And to be fair – that is $8.00 we don’t need to spend in these challenging economic times.
Come again soon – goodness knows what weather dependant activity I’ll be up to.
Sarah the Gardener : o)
So, it is worth it. That is more than I expected. I thought it would be more work than it is worth, like getting sugar from sugar cane.
The only thing in it is peanuts and a pinch of salt – no sugar needed! I’m not sure if we can grow sugar cane here – worth investigating though. : o)