How to Make Nut Butter with a Food Processor

Okay so the picture’s not very nice. That’s some almond butter I made the other morning on a whim out of raw, unskinned almonds. I wasn’t sure if it could be done in the food processor, but this website assured me it was possible.

I was so pleased with the results that I’ve since made roasted hazelnut butter and raw cashew butter. Now, toast awaits (my current bread is a wholemeal spelt loaf made using Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s recipe for Malted Grain Brain, using spelt flour in place of wheat flour – it’s tasty!).

This is so exciting. A 170g container of raw organic almond butter costs £4.89, but I can buy 3kg of whole organic almonds for £22.60. Assuming those 3 kilos of almonds would make 3 kilos of almond butter, that’s £7.50 per kilo for homemade almond butter versus £28.76 per kilo for the jarred stuff. In other words, a huge savings of £21.26 per kilo!

But enough accounting. Here’s how it’s done:

How to Make Nut Butter with a Food Processor

Acquire as many nuts as you like – I did mine in about 150g batches, but I’ll probably increase this significantly as the first few batches were so successful and disappeared quickly
Roast the nuts if desired
Put them in the food processor and turn it on to a high speed
Be patient – it will take a while for the processor to pulverize all the nuts.
Stop the food processor every so often to scrape the sides, but give it a good 2-3 minutes of uninterrupted blending between scrapings.
Keep processing and scraping until the nuts start to clump up in little balls – this means it’s starting to give up some oil and form some buttery goodness!
Add a little oil if you want – this isn’t at all necessary, but it does help achieve a smoother, more spreadable butter (if you look on the ingredients of some nut butters, especially cashew, you’ll sometimes see that they’ve added some oil for this very reason)
Keep processing until your nut butter reaches the desired consistency

Overall, it takes about 10 minutes to make and it’s so delicious! If you want to do this, I highly recommend reading Make Your Own Nut Butters at Backwoods Home Magazine, which gives some more details about specific nut butters along with some pretty pictures.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Jes

October 27th, 2009 at 2:25 pm

I haven’t made nut butter in awhile, but I was on a big vegan nutella kick for awhile. Aren’t food processors the best?

Marina

October 27th, 2009 at 2:43 pm

I love making my own nut butters. I usually do peanut butter, sometimes almond. Cashews are really expensive here, so I just enjoy them in their form

Katharina

October 29th, 2009 at 2:12 am

Ah thank you so much for posting this!! I have a ton of pecans and I love pecan butter Actually a previous comment made me wonder if I can make something similar to a Nutella.. make a hazlenut butter first then melt in some chocolate?