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Comment by BeetleB | Hacker News Reader

If you have a Vitamix, you can use roasted peanuts and just make your own preanut butter. It's trivial. No separation to worry about either.

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How much do you lose cleaning out the vitamix? I’ve found that PB costs the same amount as peanuts, by weight. If I had to roast and grind them I feel like that would take a while and result in some loss.

Is this better than using the in-grocery grinders?

Very little (I rarely make peanut butter, but I roast hazelnuts and make homemade "Nutella" with dark chocolate). Out of about 900 g hazelnuts (minus a bit of "shrinkage" because warm roasted hazelnuts are delicious) and 70 g dark chocolate (Costco Suisse Delice) we get about 850g or more of blended hazelnut chocolate goodness.

Add some almond milk and other stuff to the Vitamix and you can make a really nice power shake from the residue, and lose only a few grams to the soap and water cleaning required.

Many recipes for Vitamix peanut butter also mention mixing in some ice cream or something similar once you’ve scraped out as much peanut butter as you can. Then you get a little peanut butter smoothie as a treat at the end and help get out some of the extra peanut butter.

We do this too. And we buy huge bulk peanut bags from Azure Standard and store them in food bricks. My kids eat A LOT of peanut butter.

That’s what I came here to ask. When I make peanut butter in the Vitamix, I roast the peanuts and then blend them. I’ve never experienced separation, although I do store it in the refrigerator.

What’s so different about this way of making peanut butter that results in no separation?

Fridge and time on shelf. I'm not even sure the oil is liquid when in the fridge! And the jars at the grocery store probabky have been stored longer than you take to go through your PB.

I just buy them from Bulk Barn, here in Canada. They do that in store with a grinding machine.

In my experience, those grinding machines are good only for creamy peanut butter. I want crunchy.

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