Homemade Peanut Butter

On some level, you probably already know that, sure, it’s pretty easy to make your own peanut butter. But if you’ve never actually made homemade peanut butter, I don’t know if you quite understand how truly, incredibly, ridiculously easy it really is.

To make easy, delicious peanut butter at home, use your food processor. Then go make Kelli’s 3-Ingredient Peanut Butter Cookies. (Trust us on this one.)

• Peanuts: Use either raw peanuts (if you prefer the flavor of raw peanut butter) or pre-toasted peanuts. We like the optional step of roasting the peanuts which helps loosen the oils and makes it easier to blend into a smooth butter.
• Kosher salt: If using kosher salt, make sure the peanuts are unsalted.
• Optional ingredients: For creamier peanut butter, add peanut oil (or another favorite oil). For sweeter peanut butter, add honey (or other sweeteners).

Peanuts go through a few stages on their way to becoming spoonable, spreadable peanut butter. Here are the easy steps:

1. Pulse the peanuts until ground. At first the mix looks impossibly crumbly and dry in the bottom of your food processor, but let it go a little longer and it starts resembling actual honest-to-goodness peanut butter.
2. Process for 1 minute. Let the food processor run continuously for 1 minute. Stop and scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl.
3. Repeat this step 2 more times. After about three minutes, you might be tempted to call it good — but I’m going to give you the nod to keep on going.
4. Add the salt, oil, sweetener, and any other extras. Now is the time to add salt and any other ingredients that you want.
5. Process for 1 to 2 additional minutes. In the next minute or two, I’ve found that something magical happens. What seemed like perfectly fine peanut butter before suddenly becomes a few degrees softer and smoother. This is the stuff that peanut-buttery dreams are made of.

Just so our expectations are all in line, you should be prepared for the fact that homemade peanut butter will never be quite as perfectly smooth as, say, a jar of Skippy. Homemade peanut butter will always have a rougher texture than the commercially-prepared stuff. That being said, you can achieve creamier peanut butter with a few tips:

• Use a good-quality food processor. A powerful food processor or blender will make a difference.
• Toast the peanuts. Toasting the nuts before blending helps a lot — this warms the oils in the nuts and helps everything blend together more easily. Toasting also gives your peanut butter a deeper, richer flavor.
• Add peanut oil. You can add a bit of oil — peanut oil or another favorite oil — to help bump up the creaminess.

Go wild! Since you can make batches that are as big or small as you like, it’s very easy to experiment with different versions.

I’ve made holiday versions of peanut butter with cinnamon or pumpkin spice mix. To a make sweet “nutella”-like mix, try adding cocoa powder or a handful of chocolate chips.

You can — and should! — apply this basic blending technique to any other favorite nut or mix of nuts. This is how you make your own almond butter, pistachio butter, and all other kinds of nut butter.