Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Peanut butter bhakts do 'shramm-daan' and some out-of-the-box thinking too

So the two Resident Small Things wanted peanut butter. I bought some without reading the fine print. It was ridiculously sweet - like someone had pulsed and pasted a whole lot of pedhas or chikki or something together. Even the smallest Small Thing, with her long and wide sweet tooth, said yukk. It claimed to be 'honey-roast' in the small print. No honey, just globs of sugar.
On to producing it at home, then. Roasted them in our Philips Airfyer (my latest crush). And the Small Hands agreed to laboriously rough-up and rub the peanuts so that the thin skins came off. Then we blew at the big thali so that the skins blew off. Lot of huffing and puffing, for sure. Then a friend reminded me that my other love-of-my-life, the older one, Roland (see prev post) Food Processor, had a plastic blade that worked beautifully to take out the thin skins but leave the nuts intact. The next lot of roasted peanuts was skinned in seconds. And the Resident Small Things came up with the idea of blowing a hair dryer over the thali of peeled nuts, to blow away the skins.
Suddenly we are very mechanized. 
Peanut butter: 300 gm peanuts roasted (in oven or airfryer or kadhai) and thin skins removed. Bung them in small heavy duty mixer jar, add salt and a pinch of sugar, 1 tsp peanut oil. Keep pulsing till powder turns to moist creamy texture, pulse more if you want it smooth, leave it grainy if you like it that way. Done. Costs you 1/4th of the price of any Indian commercially available peanut butter, and you can be sure it is without any additives. Keep in fridge if you make larger quantities.

1 comment:

Sucheta Potnis said...

Peanut butter recipe wonderful. May I borrow Small Resident things to tech a thing or two to my Big Resident Things?