When people comment on my nut butter, they invariably mention the crunchy aspect of the banana chips.
That seems to leave an impression on folks.
However, going forward with this venture might require me to move away from the crunchy version altogether.
First things first: my nut butter’s crunchiness is different from the type of crunchiness you experience when eating a commercially available South African peanut butter, for example.
The type of crunchy most peanut butter manufacturers refer to, is a smooth product with hard bits of peanut in it.
Or hard bits of [insert nut name here].
My product is different.
There’s not just a roughness in the nuts, there’s also a definite crunchiness in the banana chips.
It’s like chewing loose gravel.
(A superb gravel that happens to taste good on bread, in smoothies, etc.)
The machine I use to blend the ingredients simply cannot make a smooth nut butter, or produce a fine dried banana powder.
Not if I paid it, kicked it, begged it or threatened it; not in a million years.
It’s not up to the task.
Here’s the problem with that, though: using the machine I’m currently using is not a sustainable practice.
The poor little thing has a hard time staying on the counter when I let my nut butter wrath loose on it.
I’m not kidding.
This little food processor jumps around like a Warner Bros Cartoons Acme clock about to explode.
I literally have to hold the excitable little food processor down, or it will try to bungee jump off the counter.
I don’t believe in luck; I believe God graciously provides in all things; so I don’t want to say it’s a stroke of luck that I happened upon this old crank of a food processor that just happens to produce a crunchy nut butter that’s near perfect.
But it feels like that.
And that’s the problem.
It’s a fluke.
I would like to scale in future; at the very least, make it much easier to make the nut butter that’s currently quite a mission to produce.
However, I won’t find a commercial machine that’ll produce a nut butter, the likes of which the food processor I’m currently using, does produce.
I’d have to design a custom machine, which is not a viable option, since it would cost too much.
The commercial machines available to me cannot produce a nut butter similar to the one I’m currently making using the scrappy old food processor, not even those commercial nut butter machines touted as being able to produce a crunchy nut butter.
A while ago, I bought a grain mill.
I tried it out on peanuts, and it worked well.
So I decided to move away from using the grumpy old food processor, to using the grain mill as my nut butter machine of choice.
But there’s a catch.
I’m stuck with producing a nut butter the texture of which is determined by the grain mill, which is a far cry from what the food processor produces.
That’s not a bad thing.
It simply is what it is, which is a smoother nut butter.
I have to change gears slightly, but the nut butter train’s not coming to a stop.
I’m still aiming for a top position in the Eastern Cape nut butter game, but the product will be different.
I have yet to find a viable dried banana product too.
You won’t believe how bad the service is from some of the online food stores.
People simply don’t get back to you.
It reminds me of a joke I heard many years ago: I can’t complain about the service, because there isn’t any!
In any case, the nut butter journey continues.
Hopefully, I’ll soon have a fantastic nut butter that doesn’t just taste phenomenal (like the Banana Honey Bomb), but is as nutritious as a delicious piece of flavour-oozing meat.
Man, I’m getting hungry.
Wonder if nut butter goes well with pork belly.