1 week Ago By [email protected] (Dhruv Trivedi)
If you enjoy peanut butter, making it at home may just put you off the store-bought stuff. Simple to prepare with just a few ingredients, homemade peanut butter can be tweaked to exactly how you like it, but you must start with the right peanuts. In a chat with Daily Meal, Markita Lewis, MS, RD, Marketing and Communications Manager for the National Peanut Board , gave us the lowdown on picking the right kernel for your homemade peanut butter.
As the main component of peanut butter, the kernels you use must be suited to being turned into butter. The flavor, texture, spreadability, and even shelf life of homemade peanut butter are all affected by the type of peanuts used. Lewis tell Daily Meal, "I typically use Runner peanuts for homemade peanut butter.
The kernels for Runner peanuts are mostly uniform in size, which makes them perfect for evenly roasting so that your peanut butter has a consistent taste every time." There are four common varieties of peanuts found in the U.S.
, and the good news is that if you end up using the wrong kind, your peanut butter won't be terrible. It just won't be as good as it could be. "There's no wrong type of peanut to use when making homemade peanut butter," explains Lewis, "but I wouldn't recommend using Virginia peanuts .
.. because of their large size and premium characteristics.
" Use Runner peanuts for a consistent recipe There are several reasons why Runner is the peanut variety most often used to make peanut butter. Considering about 80% of the peanuts grown in the U.S.
are of this variety, Runner peanuts are cheap enough for you to experiment with if you want to take your peanut butter to the next level with these tips Markita Lewis shared with Daily Meal . While other varieties like Virginia and Spanish have a nuttier taste, Runner peanuts have a balanced flavor that's great for butter when roasted. Most often, you'll roast the peanuts before grinding them with a mildly flavored oil and some salt to make peanut butter.
However, you can also make natural peanut butter, which has more fiber because it's made using raw peanuts ground with their skin on. If that is the case, you may want to use Spanish peanuts instead because they have a nuttier taste when raw. Knowing when to use which variety of peanuts allows you to enjoy its nuttiness exactly how you want.
It's also a good idea to keep the peanut type consistent and tweak your recipe when perfecting your homemade peanut butter. If you need to use up leftover batches, try these simple two-ingredient peanut butter pancakes for breakfast. You can also store peanut butter in the freezer without degrading its flavor by ensuring it doesn't get freezer burn and that the oil and spread haven't separated before freezing.
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