Pantry Basics - Peanut Butter

I thought I'd start posting on some pantry items that we home make for ourselves. I'm going to start out with peanut butter. Of all the things that I need to make homemade to make sure I'm eating as gluten free as possible, peanut butter isn't one that I would need to make. Generally this is a naturally gluten free food. However my dh has a bad habit of reading all those nasty on-line articles about what gets into our processed food (really you don't want to know), and telling me about it. Soon enough I've added one more thing that I make for ourselves:)  I do want to say here that we do eat processed foods. I don't make everything myself, but I am slowly working towards making a bit more here and there.

 

 Peanut butter is not a hard staple to make, but it does take some time. I start out with a little more than a pound of in-the-shell non salted peanuts. We choose non salted just so we can control the amount of salt in the peanut butter, salted peanuts would work fine though. If you start with raw peanuts that have already been shelled, you would need around 1 lb of peanuts.

 I then pulse them in my food processor until it looks like this. Then I add 1/2 t. salt, 3-4 T. of olive oil (or oil of your choice), and about 2 T. honey. Then I continue to run it in the processor until it bunches up into a ball. I usually spread it apart a bit and run it some more until it is pretty smooth. The more oil you use the more smooth it will be and the easier it will be to spread as well. I wanted to use the least amount of oil that I could and found for us that 3-4 T was a nice balance. It is a little hard to spread straight out of the frig, so I let it sit out just a bit and that helps.

This is what mine looks like when it's done. I store it in a sealed bowl in the frig. I'm not sure how long it would last as we go through it pretty fast:)