Homemade Nut Butter

Homemade Nut Butter

Making your own nut butter is a great way to save money, add quality foods to your diet, reduce packaging waste and create delicious flavor combinations. Homemade nut butter also makes a great holiday or house-warming gift. You can find cute jars at thrift stores (or use jars you've saved) and make your own labels. All you need for making nut butter is a food processor or Vitamix type blender, the ingredients and a little time.

How to Make Nut Butter

1. Add desired amount of nuts / seeds to food processor (see recipe suggestions below)
2. Add a few pinches of salt
3. Add cocoa powder and sugar if using (see recipe suggestions below)
4. Blend until mixture is mealy
5. Add 1 Tbsp of mild liquid oil (such as sunflower or canola) for every cup of nuts
6. Blend on high power until well mixed
7. Add additional oil if needed
8. Add additional ingredients (see suggestions below) as desired. If you want chunky nut butter, add another handful of nuts and blend briefly

How to Toast Nuts & Seeds

I like to toast nuts and seeds before making them into butter. Toasting them brings out their flavor and gives the butter a richer taste. To toast, place nuts & seeds in a baking pan (the big metal ones work well) and sprinkle with salt. They'll toast best if they're not much more than 1 layer deep. Place in oven at 375°F. Set timer to stir nuts/seeds every 10 minutes. Most nuts and seeds will be adequately toasted within 20–30 minutes. You can also do this in a dry skillet on the stove top. Stove-top toasting usually takes 10 to 15 minutes, but you need to stir much more frequently or they'll burn. Allow the nuts to cool a bit before putting them in the food processor.

Nut & Seed Suggestions

• Peanuts
• Almonds
• Cashews
• Walnuts
• Pecans
• Hazlenuts
• Pumpkin seeds
• Sunflower seeds
• Hemp seeds

Additional Ingredient Suggestions

• Cacao nibs
• Cocoa powder
• Ground coffee (decaf and/or regular)
• Coconut
• Cinnamon
• Dried sweetener such as maple sugar, date sugar, coconut sugar. Liquid sweeteners like honey and maple syrup don't work well as they give the nut butter a mealy consistency that's hard to spread.
• Pinch of vanilla powder

A few Recipes for Homemade Nut Butter

Here are a few recipe suggestions with combinations of ingredients that work well together. Follow the instructions above under How to Make Nut Butter. To make a bigger batch, just multiply each ingredient by 1.5, 2 or other number as desired.

Cashew-Almond-Coffee-Cacao

• 1 cup toasted cashews
• 1 cup toasted almonds
• 2 Tbsp cacao nibs or chocolate chips
• 2 Tbsp light oil
• 1 Tbsp ground coffee
• 1 Tbsp maple sugar or other sugar
• 1 Tsp vanilla powder
• 1 tsp salt (or more to taste)

Walnut-Pumpkin Seed-Cocoa-Coconut

• 1 cup raw or toasted walnuts
• 1 cup toasted pumpkin seeds
• 1/3 cup dried coconut flakes
• 2 Tbsp cocoa powder
• 2 Tbsp light oil
• 1 Tbsp maple sugar or other sugar
• 1 tsp salt (or more to taste)

Peanut-Cashew

• 1 cup toasted peanuts
• 1 cup toasted cashews
• 2 Tbsp light oil
• 1 tsp salt (or more to taste)

Some Sources for Organic Bulk Nuts & Seeds

If you're going to make a big batch of nut butter for gifts (or if you just eat a lot of it), it's more economical to buy the ingredients in bulk. Using organic nuts is a good way to help prevent chemical pollution of the environment and your body. I've found the sources below to be reliable for organic nuts and seeds.

Terrasoul

Essential Organics

Azure Standard

Enjoy your homemade nut butter on crackers, pancakes, in smoothies, oatmeal, baked goods, etc.!