How to Make the Ultimate Peanut Butter with Your Vitamix

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My wife and I love peanut butter. We have passed this love of peanut butter onto our children. Peanut butter by the spoonful is an everyday occurrence at our house. While we do love peanut butter we don’t love how it is made. Regular peanut butter might as well be sold in the cake frosting isle. If you have ever eaten natural peanut butter for an extended period of time and then had some regular peanut butter you’ll know what I mean – it is so unnecessarily sweet (nasty). So if regular peanut butter is out then our next option would be natural peanut butter. Natural peanut butter can be put into one of two categories – peanut butter that separates and peanut butter that doesn’t.

I’m not a fan of natural peanut with the oil that separates. It is a huge pain to mix back in and I end up getting oil everywhere. You could get one of these to mix the oil back in but that wasn’t the solution I was personally looking for. You can also store your peanut butter upside down so that the oil goes to the top (which is really the bottom) but then you end up eating peanut butter sans oil most of the time – again, not the solution I was looking for.

The other option is to buy natural peanut butter that has palm oil mixed in. The addition of this saturated fat prevents the separation of the oil from the peanut butter. While this works, the addition of palm oil which is essentially the food industry’s solution to not using trans fat in foods cheapens the nutritional experience of  peanut butter for me.

How could I get an awesome peanut butter that didn’t have cheap additives (palm oil, sugar, etc) but also had oil that stayed mixed into it?

The Ultimate Peanut Butter Solution

For Christmas my wife and I were fortunate enough to receive a Vitamix from my parents (pretty awesome gift!). Vitamix has a peanut butter recipe in the cookbook that comes with it but the recipe was essential add peanut and blend. This was a good start but it didn’t solve my natural peanut butter problems.

I started thinking and doing a little testing. I’m a big fan of protein (not surprising to regular readers of my blog). I’m always trying to find ways to add more protein to foods (oftentimes via protein powder) without changing the taste or texture. So of course adding whey to my homemade peanut butter was one of my first ideas. One additional piece about whey which makes it a great addition to peanut butter is that it is an emulsifier. Whey is just what I needed to keep the peanut oil from separating from the peanut butter. The whey protein that I chose to use was BiPro Whey. It is just whey protein isolate (and a little soy lecithin to enhance dissolving) and nothing else. No sweeteners, no colors, no flavorings. It is perfect for the job.

Whenever I’m making recipes I also like to pack in other high powered nutrients. Additional fiber, omega-3 fats, and antioxidants are top on my list (after protein). One food that contains all of these things is flax.  Flax has a nutty taste which would go well with peanut butter. It also turns out that the Vitamix is so powerful, it blended the flax up so you couldn’t even see it.

Flax and whey. These are my two additional choices for making the Ultimate Peanut Butter with no oil separation.

Ultimate Peanut Butter before blending

Here are all the ingredients locked and loaded.

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Ultimate Peanut Butter - Finished Product

60-90 seconds later we’re all done.

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Several Different Ultimate Nut Butters

I went on to make a couple other nut butters including almond butter (right) and a peanut/almond butter mix (top) – all delicious.

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My quest to make the Ultimate Peanut Butter was huge success. Here are the key points to why:

  1. No added sugar
  2. No added palm oil
  3. The oil doesn’t separate out
  4. The protein and nutrient content are increased without impacting the taste
  5. My wife and three kids love it.

The taste of freshly made peanut butter is pretty amazing and makes even the best organic natural peanut butter from the store seem kind of lame. Here is the ingredient list and nutrition facts.

Ultimate Peanut Butter

Makes 15-16 2 TBSP Servings

  • 3 cups of peanut
  • 2 scoop/packets BiPro Whey
  • 1/4 cup flaxmeal
  • 1/2 tsp sea salt (adjust based on taste)
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Nutrition Information per Serving:  202 calories, 16g fat (2.2g saturated, 7.2g monounsaturated, 5.6 g polyunsaturated), 8g carbohydrate, 4g fiber, 10g protein)
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