The Quest For Boiling Peanuts - Beware Moldy, Musty Peanuts

I recently had my mind blown when I had my first ever boiled peanuts.

They were soft, funky, hot and bean-like. The boiling process revolutionized my conception of the peanut.

And of course, I set about trying to figure out how I could make them myself. It turns out, that might not be as easy as it first appears. It is not that the boiling process is hard, but rather the need for specific kinds of peanuts.

Option one is raw peanuts. These peanuts have not been roasted, but they have had a large amount of their moisture removed through drying. You can boil them, but it takes upwards of eight hours or more.

The ideal choice would be green peanuts. These peanuts are not actually green in color, they ate just very fresh. Green peanuts have most of their original moisture content. As a result they cook in about 4 hours.

The perfect boiled peanuts required green peanuts, but where the hell was I going to find those?

Just down the street from my apartment as it turned out

Imagine my surprise when I stopped by the local grocery store for some vegetables only to find a stack of fresh green peanuts!

This truly is the awesome power of New York City, and more specifically Queens County. I would fathom a guess that almost any obscure ingredient can be found by me somewhere within 3 miles of my house. Green peanuts may not be the weirdest ingredient I found, but I'm certainly adding them to the list.

Now, if everything went according to plan, this post would be about my finished product. So needless to say, something must have gone wrong.

Take a look at this blurry close up of the peanuts and see for yourself.

Sorry about the photo quality, but I felt a little uncomfortable in the small store photographing their goods.

But it doesn't take a botanist, or dare I say a Mycologist ;), to see that something is wrong with this damn peanuts!

Do you see those black spots all over the shells? They look suspiciously like mold or possibly fungus. I opened up a few of them, and the peanuts themselves looked unaffected. However you don't shell peanuts before you boil them, and so I was hesitant to use them if they were infested with some kind of mold.

My conclusion that there might be some kind of infestation of mold was further bolstered by the terrible odor coming off of the peanuts as I put them into a bag. It was something akin to the musty acrid odor of an old attic with a leaky roof.

There are several fungi and at least one black mold that tends to grow on peanuts. None of those investigations are good for you . And apparently green peanuts, with their higher moisture content, tend to be more susceptible. Indeed my accounts green peanuts really oughta be stored in a refrigerated section.

Additionally that kind of musty odor can be a sign of just plain rancidity. No matter what the cause was, these were not peanuts I wanted to eat.

None the less, stuff for 20 minutes debating whether or not to boil them anyway. That's the wrong when was I going to find green peanuts again? But in the end, I put them back. It looks like raw peanuts are in my future.