It doesn’t, but I can taste it, and I’m not sure I want coconut for breakfast every single morning. Though the oil is not completely neutral, I don’t find that it overwhelms the taste of the nuts.” I like its texture as well, because it spreads smoothly when totally cold, but isn’t runny on the knife. “In my experience,” she writes, “using a small amount of coconut oil and transferring the finished product to the refrigerator immediately results in a butter that holds together without getting oily on top or dry on the bottom. Recipes that roast them from raw, such as Sheridan’s, add extra fat. When I look at the ingredients lists, I realise that they all have oil added, which explains a lot. I’m interested to note that the versions made from ready-roasted nuts do not suffer from this problem. One of the problems with worthier nut butters is their tendency to separate. Raw peanuts are also often sold with the skins on, which I think adds flavour as well as fibre, but I concede that may be a hippy step too far for some. If you can’t find raw peanuts, or are on a strict budget, go for salted ones. I’d prefer to start from scratch, however, so I have more control over the oil and salt levels. That said, the first might appeal to the sweet-toothed, with its pleasingly crunchy, sugary texture, and the latter feels as if it might make a decent base for a savoury sauce.
As she rinses them afterwards, they are not overpoweringly salty, and are certainly a better choice flavourwise than blogger Averie Sunshine’s honey-roasted ones or the Brown-Eyed Baker’s dry-roasted variety, both of which taste just as you would expect: delicious with a pint on a Friday night, less suited to slapping on toast the morning after. Jack Monroe uses salted peanuts because they tend to be cheaper, then roasts them again “to deepen the flavour”. I also try them dry-roasted in a pan, which is a good alternative if you don’t want to turn the oven on, but which inevitably means they brown less evenly, as well as requiring you to stand over the stove, prodding them so they don’t burn. The other recipes I try call for them ready-roasted and unsalted, which prove incredibly hard to come by in this country, for some reason: either I’m going to have to pick them out of a fruit and nut selection, or roast them myself. Food writer Molly Sheridan bakes them in an 180C/350F/gas mark four oven, while presenter Alton Brown fries his in a wok, explaining: “Although peanuts are often roasted, believe it or not, frying is going to bring out even more of those toasty flavours and aromas.” They are nicer eaten on their own, hot from the pan, but I’m not convinced that this translates into a better-tasting peanut butter – and it’s far easier to burn them this way, too. Like all nuts, peanuts (which aren’t a nut at all, but a legume, just like last week’s peas) are immeasurably improved by heat: raw, they’re frankly underwhelming. The spread was always highly nutritious, and the emergence of sugar-free, organic, “all-natural” varieties aimed more squarely at the health-conscious adult market has seen it push past its citrussy rival to make it into the top three spreads for the first time (behind honey and jam), thanks perhaps to some adjustment to suit adult tastes. Marmalade, perhaps, with its chunks of bitter, chewy peel, or an ancient porcelain pot of Gentleman’s Relish. In time, you were expected to give it up in favour of more sophisticated toast toppers. Until relatively recently, peanut butter was, like my equally beloved fish fingers, a distinctly childish pleasure. It might have something to do with that claggy-mouth texture: the American author William F Buckley Jr, who was at school in London in the 1930s, recalled his classmates’ revulsion at his stash of Skippy, but the ban on it in our household only made my heart grow fonder. Peanut butter has taken a long time to melt the British market.
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