I have a love-hate relationship with peanut butter. I want to love it, but every time I eat it I get sick─it's been that way ever since I was a little. Here's the thing, I don't have a peanut allergy, but I feel sick when I eat peanut butter because I'm sensitive to hydrogenated oils and other preservatives. To avoid feeling crummy, I make peanut butter at home, which can get boring after a while. I've taken to adding different flavors to my homemade peanut butter. How much more hipster can I get?
The great thing about flavored peanut butter is that─much like homemade Nutella─it lacks preservatives and other add-ins that can wreck your digestive system. A lot of the time, these flavors involve chocolate since it's incredibly easy to incorporate into your peanut butter. Just add some chocolate as you're making it and presto, done.
What Do You Need?
Making peanut butter is actually super easy, and it's not even remotely harder to make flavored peanut butter. All you need is a food processor or blender, peanuts, salt, and whatever flavoring agents (or sweeteners) you want.
#SpoonTip: Use a bullet or personal blender instead of a food processor. Actually just use a blender. It generally has sharper blades than a food processor and makes everything so much easier.
Start With Peanuts
Fill your blender with peanuts. If you don't have enough peanut butter, you can always add more peanuts. Sprinkle in a dash of salt if you like salted peanut butter.
Now, you may think you need to add more to your peanut butter, but you don't. Don't add anything to make this overly-processed and disgusting. Just turn on your affordable blender and blend until your peanuts start to release the oil that'll bind the pulverized peanuts together.
A great thing is that you can easily choose to make chunky or creamy peanut butter. It's just a matter of choosing when to stop blending. Once your peanut butter has warmed up (aka when it's obviously peanut butter) it's easy to begin adding flavors.
What Can You Add?
If you want to make flavored peanut butter, then you have to make sure you use items that can melt and be easily incorporated. This includes, but is not limited to: salted caramel, chocolate, coconut, honey, and bananas.
There are a bunch of great flavor combinations like chocolate cherry, dark chocolate salted caramel, and vanilla honey, just to name a few. A personal favorite of mine is white chocolate coconut peanut butter, which you can make using a Lindt bar or using white chocolate and shredded coconut. If you add bananas, you'll make a peanut butter inspired by Elvis.
Once you've blended your peanut butter to the point your flavoring is fully incorporated, transfer it to a jar and refrigerate. Remember that there are no preservatives so you have to eat your peanut butter pretty quickly. But it's delicious, so that shouldn't be a problem.