Boiled Peanuts

Recently, my wife moved the portable computer down to the living room so she could play poker on line while she watched TV. She would generally play two tables at once and surf the TV channels. Talk about the need for mental stimulation. Recently, she's been slacking off the 'puter a bit so, since the computer is sitting in the living room already, I can blog while I'm vegging on the TV.

Today I want to talk about boiled peanuts, or more specifically, how to use science to cook them. If you look in a thousand books and on the internet, you can get lots of history and a bunch of recipes. After perusing them for a bit, I discovered the secret. A lot of recipes tell you to boil them for a couple of hours in salt water and serve. Well, I can tell you that don't work. The peanuts aren't even close to being done. The secret is to get the juice into the nut so that they taste right. "Right" being salty and juicy.

OK, here's the science. It's mostly physics or maybe chemistry if you believe that the behavior of liquids and gasses is the domain of chemistry rather than physics. But because there is little or no bond breaking, I, being an organic chemist, tend to think of this as physics. So, the problem is to get the juice into the peanut.

You start out with a peanut that is filled with air inside sitting in a pot that has water outside the peanut. As you heat the liquid, the air (gas) inside the peanut expands and builds up pressure which does a great job of keeping any water out. As you boil away, some of the gas escapes through the shell into the water, but for the most part, a positive pressure remains inside keeping the water out. This is not what you want.

So what you do is heat the peanuts in water for a while, say about an hour. During this time, some gas escapes from the inside of the peanut. Then you let the peanuts cool. Because much of the gas escaped through the shell, when the peanuts cool back down, the gas contracts to occupy less space than originally needed. When this happens, an actual vacuum is created inside the peanut which sucks in that succulent salt water infused with all the flavoring of the peanut shells. Then you heat the suckers back up again and this time the peanuts inside the shell are bathed in a salty solution. As they heat up, they cook inside the little pressure cooker of the shell. Of course, the shells are somewhat permeable so the peanuts leak out a bit of the air and juice to avoid exploding.

So here's my recipe.

Get a bunch of fresh peanuts and wash off any dirt that's on them. A quick rinse will do. Don't get anal about this step.

Get a big pot and pour in a bunch of water and a bunch of salt and a dash or two of winegar. Then toss in the goobers and heat for 1 and 1/2 hours. Turn off the heat and remove from the burner and let the brew cool off for one hour. Then return to the burner and boil for another 1.5 hours.

You can eat the peanuts now.

Peanuts are best eaten with your hands. Squeeze the shell and the secret opening reveals itself. Pry the shell apart with your fingers and place the peanuts up next to your lips. With a loud slurping sound and a great sucking motion, the peanuts will fly out of their shell into your mouth. Munch them down quickly so that you can get another one up next to your lips before the flavor fades. You should repeat the process as fast as you can till you reach a state of life altering euphoria. If you're fast, you'll also eat more than the other fool slurping away across the table.

Hope this helps. I know it still takes 4 hours, but if you leave out the cool down step, the peanuts will still be hard as a rock after 4 hours and you will be abondoning science when you need it most.

So till next time.