What's in Peanut Butter? | Ingredients With George Zaidan (Episode 7)

What's in here? What does it do, and can I make it from scratch? Ingredients for the purposes of peanut butter: peanuts are just peanut oil and then all the stuff in here that is not peanut oil. So, things like sugars, starches, and proteins.

When you blend a bunch of peanuts, what you end up with is peanut particles floating around in peanut oil. Now, this is called a suspension because the peanut particles are suspended in the oil. Eventually, those particles will settle to the bottom, leaving you with peanut oil floating on top. No matter how long you keep your blender going, your peanut butter is going to separate out into two layers, and it's also going to be runny because at 25° C a suspension of 50 to 60% peanut particles in peanut oil, which is what peanut butter is, is just runny.

And that's the way it is. But this peanut butter does not separate, and it's not runny. So, what's in here that's not in here that makes for such a huge difference in texture? Well, this just has peanuts and salt; we knew that. And this has peanuts and salt too, but there's a bunch of other stuff in here. First on that list is sugar, and that's in there mostly for flavor.

There's also 2% or less of molasses, which I'm guessing is more for color than for flavor. Then there's fully hydrogenated vegetable oils—in this case, rapeseed (aka canola and soybean oils) and mono and diglycerides. Now let's talk about the hydrogenated oils. First, to make a very long story short, hydrogenating veggie oils changes them from unsaturated fats, which are usually liquid at room temperature, to saturated fats, which are usually solid at room temperature.

Now, I'll post a link to a video in the description that explains why this is the case more fully, but all you need to worry about right now is liquid to solid. So, adding hydrogenated veggie oils, which remember are solid, to peanut butter is, I think, what keeps it from being runny. But there's still the issue of separation, and fat I think is where the mono and diglycerides come in.

Now, these molecules are kind of like a third of a fat or two-thirds of a fat, respectively. They're sort of fatty on this end here and kind of watery on this end here. For that reason, they're used to mix fatty stuff like peanut oil with watery stuff like peanut sugars and protein, keeping it all together.

So to make our non-runny, non-separating peanut butter, we're going to need direct-from-nature versions of both hydrogenated veggie oils and mono and diglycerides. Now, chemically, hydrogenated veggie oils were pretty close to butter, but respect for vegetarians, vegans, and those among us who are lactose intolerant, I'm going to use cocoa butter, which comes from plants and is really high in saturated fat.

As you can see, it is solid at room temperature. Instead of mono and diglycerides, I'm going to use lecithin—in this case, soy lecithin, which comes from soybeans and is a natural emulsifier. So let's do this and see what happens.

[Music] We're getting! [Applause] [Music] [Applause] There!

Okay, so let's see. Good sign: not runny—or not very runny at least. Come on, come on, you can do it! Yeah, this looks unfortunate. I hope it tastes better than it looks. Come on, there may be a better way to do this here. Hang on—see, ah! It's getting everywhere!

Okay, good enough. So, now obviously I'm not going to be able to tell you whether this is going to separate until it sits around for a while. So I'm going to clean this up and then let it sit around for a while. But I can taste it and tell you what it tastes like, 'cause cocoa butter has a very distinct aroma. Actually, if you add some to hot chocolate, it's incredible!

But let's see what this tastes like. Hmm, very um... it sticks to everything. It's sticky, but you don't really taste it. It tastes like peanut butter; it tastes pretty good.

Okay, so I'm going to go put this somewhere, and I'll let you know what happens.

All right, so it's been a few months, and I have our homemade peanut butter. Now, as you can see, it has separated. So you might think we failed, but back when I made this, I also made this. This just has peanuts and salt—no cocoa butter, no soy lecithin.

If you do a little bit of math, you'll see that our version separates a little bit less, which is great! But what about the runny issue? Let's find out!

[Music] Moment of Truth!

Okay, so it's still runny, but that is way less than the peanut butter with just peanuts. That is not bad! So overall, our homemade peanut butter separates, but not as much, and it still runs, but also not as much.

I am reasonably impressed. That's not bad! I'm going to give this 7 out of 10—solid but not perfect. Now, if you guys have comments, let me know below, and if you have an idea for an episode, hit me up on Twitter! Until then, I'm going to go eat this sort of runny, sort of separated peanut [Music] butter.