Ingredient Number Two:
Salt.
Salt is very cheap - much cheaper than peanuts - so it would make good financial sense to squeeze as much salt into the peanut butter as we could. Unfortunately though, if it was too salty, you couldn't eat it, and if you couldn't eat it you'd never run out and if you never ran out you would never need to buy any more.
Deciding just how much salt to add was, therefore, no easy task. We came to the magic amount by adding less and less until there was just enough to bring out the flavour of the nuts when you eat it out of the jar. Personally, when I spread it on my toast I prefer it a bit saltier, and I sprinkle a little extra on top. I have had customers recoil in horror when I suggest this, but hey, why should I be the one who decides how much salt you eat huh?
My mates the TV chefs use salt all the time in their cooking, but they always make sure the salt and pepper's there on your table don't they? So why all the fuss? It's just something I thought was interesting, that's all.
I met a woman during tastings at Moore Wilson who had thrown out a jar of our peanut butter and declared that she'd never buy it again. She was near the end of her second jar, spread some on a sandwich and almost threw up with a mouthful of salt.
It wasn't the first time we had had a complaint about patches of excess salt, and initially I thought we had a problem with our grinder getting an unseen buildup of salt that made its way unnoticed into a jar. I thought it a reasonable explanation, but it didn't account for the salt patches always appearing in the bottom of the jars.
It seemed most unlikely that the salt was sinking to the bottom, but we took a close look at the oil on top of a jar that had been sitting around for a while was starting to separate. We drained the oil off, and put it in a jar with a teaspoon of salt and shook it. Nothing happened. Salt, it appears, doesn't dissolve in oil - so when the oil in your peanut butter rises to the top, the salt heads for the bottom. Its physics, and the only way you or I can do anything about it is to give our peanut butter a good stir every now and then, or to buy unsalted peanut butter and sprinkle salt on your peanut butter after spreading it on your toast.
The salt we use comes from the Dominion Salt Company, just over the hill in Blenheim. Blenheim gets lots of sun. Sometimes they like to claim that they get more sun than Nelson, which is fine with us, because Blenheim has very little else to skite about. Anyway, we buy sacks of table salt - so-named because its the sort of salt you use at the table. It is made by evaporating salt water in the sun, then adding a teeny bit of iodine.
Naturally, some folks recoil in horror at the mention of table salt. I have been told that the wicked Blenheim saltmakers use bleach to make their salt so pure and white. I tell you, I hear things at the Nelson market that would make your hair curl. Soon we will have a bloggish area somewhere on this site where you, if you have haircurling facts that need to be told, can tell us all about it.
In the meantime, here's what I reckon about iodine.
Iodine is a mineral that lives in the soil. Animals need it for brain development and reproductive health. New Zealand, though perfect in every other way, has very low levels of iodine in its soils, and NZ farmers have always fed iodised salt licks to their stock - even their Biogro organically certified animals.
While iodine hasn't made a noticeable difference to the intelligence of sheep, it ensures they reproduce abundantly and produce good healthy chops. In recent years though, human consumption of iodine has dropped dramatically as a fashion for "natural sea salt" has come into play.
So we use iodised salt. Using "natural sea salt" would have saved me from the ire of one or two market buyers who were shocked ... shocked I tell you ... to be told the awful truth. "Do you know that they bleach that table salt?". "Do you know that natural sea salt contains all the minerals you need?" "You can look it up on the internet ..."
But far be it from me to force you, dear reader/eater, to eat iodised salt if you don't want to. So if you have a particular salt preference you can indulge it to your heart's content by buying Pic's Really Good Unsalted Peanut Butter and sprinkling it with the condiment of your choice.
Ingredient Number One:
Peanuts
Lots of people eat peanuts. 29 million tonnes grew on earth last year. That's a 1Kg jar of peanut butter a week for 580 million people. An encouraging thought for any peanut butter maker, and a very good thing for those who get to eat it.
Peanuts are very very good for you.
That's all I'm going to say on the subject, and if you want to know why they are so good, follow these links:
www.hubpages.com
www.whfoods.com
www.vegan.org.nz
www.medicinenet.com
Peanuts are a commodity - like milk powder, pine logs, oil and pork bellies. They are grown anywhere in the world that is warm enough. When the weather is right there are lots of nuts, and when there are lots of nuts their price goes down. This is a very good thing for the customers of reputable peanut butter makers, because the price of their peanut butter will fall.
But come next year, one grower looks at the measley return his nuts brought him and converts his land to dairying. Then there's a drought in Argentina, floods in Australia and a plague of locusts in Africa. World-wide production is down forty percent and the world's peanut butter makers, brownie cooks and peanut brokers are mortgaging their homes and taking in ironing to pay for those increasingly scarce nuts. And the price of your peanut butter goes up.
This happened to us. For our first 18 months of peanut butter making, raw nuts cost us around $1700 a tonne. Then suddenly, boof, they were $2250. I didn't know any of the things I just told you about commodities, and it came just after we took on George to help in the factory and there was nothing we could do but raise our prices and cross our fingers.