Homemade Peanut Butter Recipe (Video)

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The kids received a little cookbook for Christmas with easy recipes to make. One of the recipes was for peanut butter. We've made our own peanut butter a few times now, and have experimented with the amount of peanuts vs. oil. Here is what we think is the absolute best combination!

What is the difference between natural peanut butter and traditional peanut butter?

If you've ever been to a health food store, you've probably seen a natural peanut butter grinder. There is only one ingredient in natural peanut butter: peanuts. My kids love grinding their own, and filling up a container to bring home. You can also buy natural peanut butter in the peanut butter aisle. It will be labeled as "natural", and is free of hydrogenated oils or any added ingredients.

Traditional peanut butter spread, the kind that you find in the peanut butter aisle, often includes additional ingredients like sugar, salt, and hydrogenated oils.

We don't have a commercial grinder or powerful food processor, so we add a small amount of oil to get our peanut butter as smooth as the one from the store. Because we add a tiny bit of oil it isn't considered natural peanut butter, but is pretty darn close.

2 Ingredient Peanut Butter

The ingredients are simple:

1. Peanuts
2. Oil

The best peanuts to use are roasted peanuts. Roasted peanuts come in unsalted, salted, and honey roasted. We recommend using unsalted. You can control the salt content by adding a small amount of salt to your peanut butter if you'd like. The obvious choice for oil would be peanut oil, but if you don't have any you can use sunflower or canola. If you own a heavy duty food processor you might not need oil at all. I use our blender to make peanut butter, and it does a great job, but a couple tablespoons of oil makes the peanut butter nice and smooth.

Peanut Butter Add-Ins

Here are some simple ways to customize your peanut butter:

You can make other nut butters like almond butter, too!