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I was going to use this as an excuse to sing the praises of homemade peanut butter when I saw the headline, but then I read the article and realized that no amount of peanut butter you make will protect you from the lowest-bidder food provider strategy used in schools and hospitals. I'm not sure which is more sad, giving kids tainted food or giving sick people tainted food.
I'll talk about making your own peanut butter anyway, as the process is so simple it will make you wonder how the food industry can manage to get salmonella in there at all. All you have to do is get over the fact that it doesn't have high fructose corn syrup, or a mountain of preservatives, or added oils. Real peanut butter has one ingredient - peanuts. Real peanut butter takes about 10 minutes to make. Real peanut butter requires a single appliance.
So here's what you do to make peanut butter:
1. Buy a big bucket of plain peanuts. Go to Sams or Costco or wherever. Be careful! There are at least two varieties of plain peanuts - one has peanuts and salt, the other has extras like corn syrup. Sadly, you do have to check the ingredients on plain peanuts.
2. Go home and put a bunch of peanuts in the food processor, turn it on.
3. Wait a while. The food processor will sound angry, but do not be alarmed, it will get quieter. Let it go for 5 minutes, check the consistency. The smoother you want it, the longer you leave it in there.
4. Scrape into container with lid, place in fridge right away.
Note: Unlike store bought real peanut butter, this won't separate as long as you get it in the fridge quickly.
I don't know how we went down the road of mass producing something that is so easy to make on a small scale, or how it ended up that real peanut butter sitting along side the mass produced peanut butter on the grocery shelf costs so much more.. And with a process that simple, how do you make people sick with the finished product? I guess if you try hard enough...maybe rub some uncooked chicken in there or something? Yummy chicken flavored peanut butter!
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Btw, storebought non-natural peanut butter doesn't contain any HFCS or preservatives, either. Just the dash of hydrogenated oil to make it stay together, which is the one thing I want to avoid most (though I have a brand that uses fully hydrogenated, which is slightly less bad than partially).
Also, out of curiosity, how much peanut butter do you get from a given volume/weight of peanuts? Just wondering if other nut-butters would be at all affordable or if you just need so much per cup that it'd be crazy expensive.
Edited at 2009-01-11 04:14 pm (UTC)
I'm not sure how many peanuts makes how much peanut butter. Annie always makes it and we don't make a whole lot at a time because we don't have containers that big. She only goes to Sams once a month, though, so a big bucket of peanuts will last at least that long (and we eat a lot of peanut butter, it's like having two kids in the house).
We did try almond butter but just didn't like it that much. We haven't tried other nut butters, pretty happy just to eat peanut butter all the time. :)