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.
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?
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 🙂
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?
aw thank you, thank you for this! As soon as I can get around to making my own nut butter, this will definitely come in handy.
This looks easy to make. I would love to try this one. Thanks a lot. I find it delicious.