Chiponde (Malawi)

The explanatory title underneath Chiponde in the book calls this peanut butter.  Peanut butter isn't something we usually have in the house, mainly because Soph is the only one who really likes it and even she doesn't often fancy it.  But this recipe sounded interesting still and looked very simple. 

 We made one slight alteration in that it asked for sea salt, which we couldn't find at the time. Instead, we bought rock salt and ground it in the pestel and morter. 

The recipe essentially just uses peanuts, salt and water - no sugar and no butter - so I suppose it's healthier than store bought peanut butter. Check one in the plus collumn. 

The peanuts are roasted in the oven which doesn't take long at all, it's not hard to judge when they're ready, and it makes your kitchen smell amazing so step one was a hit with us.  

They then have to be whizzed up into crumbs which was equally as easy and quick with Soph's amazing food processor.  

The next step is adding the salt and water until it gets to the consistency that you like your peanut butter to have. We were going for creamy and light.  

To get the right consistency it took us two tries adding water but the recipe still only took about 15 minutes to complete.  You also have to leave it rest every so often so that you can check the consistency.  It gets quite hard to stir after a while though so we just decided it was good enough after using about twice the amount of water indicated in the book.  

The end result was tasty enough but it doesn't compare to the store bought version. Even though I don't really like peanut butter on it's own, we do have quite a few recipes we make that use it so it would be better to not have to buy it. I think if we were to make it again we would add a little sugar to the mix though since it's definitely lacking a little in sweetness. 

The recipe says to pop it in a jar and keep it in the fridge so that's what we've done. Now the test is how long it lasts.

We are both very glad that we tried this recipe because the thought had never ocurred to us that it would be this easy to make. It's not at all time consuming so it might be an idea for us to perfect this recipe because peanut butter is quite an expensive comodity here.