Building the perfect peanut butter

Peanut butter is a staple on my breakfast table, but I’ve long been frustrated by the standard array of options. Specifically, there seem to be two types of peanut butter that exist: processed (which is a complex blend of peanuts, oils from various sources, sugar, salt, and stabilizers) and all-natural (which contains nothing but peanuts, and sometimes salt and additional oil, but has an annoying habit of separating into an oil phase and a solids phase). On the one hand, I don’t necessarily want sugar in my peanut butter, but on the other, I don’t want to have to stir it before I spread it.

But it suddenly hit me one day when I was reading labels in the grocery store: if I made my own peanut butter, I could choose what to leave out, and what to add. And that includes adding my own stabilizers.

Maltodextrin is a long-ish chain of sugar molecules somewhere between a disaccharide (like table sugar) and a starch. It can absorb fats, and has risen to fame among avant-garde chefs in the form of N-Zorbit, a specific formulation of tapioca maltodextrin that can give oils and oil-based mixtures a powdery texture that reconstitutes in the mouth. Of course, not everyone is a fan of the resulting gummy mouthfeel, but since peanut butter is gummy to begin with, I find it works very well in that context, like the powder in the photo above.

As a proof-of-concept for my “perfect peanut butter,” I bought some pre-made natural peanut butter, consisting of nothing but peanuts, and mixed in maltodextrin until it just lost its shininess, suggesting that most of the oil had been absorbed. It worked out to about 60g of maltodextrin to 180g of peanut butter. I’ll leave it to stand for a few days, and if the oil doesn’t separate out, I’ll call it a success, and try making some up completely from scratch.