I want to enjoy peanuts' protein without as many calories, so I want to separate some oil from peanuts with simple home equipment. Is this possible?
How much oil can I separate? Can I remove 50-60% of the oil just by removing the top layer of oil from the peanut butter?
Disclaimer: I did not try it, but it should work from a chemical point of view.
Put the ground peanuts or peanut butter into a pot and add the same amount of water*, stir well and bring to a boil. Pour it in a Fat Separator to separate oil and peanuts. Pour the peanut water mix into a heat resistant form and put in the oven to dry at low temperature.
If you want to use the peanuts minus oil for baking you could use milk instead of water, that way you don't have to dry it after separation.
*if the mixture is too thick for the fat separator use more water.
As an alternative you can use the method used when making paneer or potato dumplings: Put the ground peanuts or peanut butter in a dry cloth. Take the four corners together and spin to squeeze oil out. This is much easier but less efficient as well.
When you discard the oil on top of the peanut butter it does reduce the fat content, but compared to the glass of peanut butter it is only a small amount of fat you remove with the oil, it would not be 50-60%. Do you wish to enjoy peanut butter and not want to much fat? Or do you want the plant based protein from the peanuts? If the plant based protein is your wish then I would recommend hemp or sunflower seed protein, which is readily available in powder form almost everywhere. 100g of peanuts have about 26g of protein, sunflower seeds about 21g.
