homemade almond butter

I’ve shared recipes for almond meal and almond milk, so to round out the almond love, here’s how to make almond butter.

Almond butter is a delicious alternative to peanut butter – it makes a great protein snack in an increasingly peanut-free world. I have a delicious recipe for muesli bars that uses peanut butter – substituting almond butter almost makes these muesli bars better!

You can save money and make your own almond butter at home (and any other nut butter you fancy) with a food processor and a little time.

It’s basically what you get if you forget to turn the processor off when making almond meal.

There is one ingredient: almonds. Raw, unsalted almonds.

I used 3 cups of almonds and that almost filled a 500g jar of almond butter – it would have been completely full, but I had to sample it a bit, you know, for quality control purposes.

It amounts to a saving of around $9 per kilo, using the price of almonds at my local Woolies as well as the price of the Woolies Macro brand almond ‘spread’.

Depending on the power of your food processor, making your own nut butter can take as little as 5 minutes up to around 30 minutes.

Patience is key.

Just when you think it’s never going to transform from a crumbly mixture into a creamy butter, it does very quickly.

The process actually took me closer to an hour and a half, but I stopped a lot to make sure I didn’t burn the motor out of my 10 year old food processor and I had to make the kids’ lunch, clean them up, watch the little lady, who is crawling all over the place and trying to pull herself up on the furniture…

Things just take longer when you’ve got kids.

So if you’ve been mixing the darn thing for longer than 30 minutes, trust that it will turn into creamy goodness – eventually.

Making nut butter was a bit hard on my food processor. It struggled a bit. The results were unbelievably smooth and yummy though.

I’ve read recipes where people roast their almonds first. Obviously, this will give a different flavour to raw almonds. Or you could ‘activate’ your almonds, if you prefer.

Experiment to see what you like best.

The friction from the blending actually made my almonds quite hot (hot enough to produce steam), so I guess you could say they were partially ‘cooked’ anyway.

Method

1. Throw 3 cups of almonds into the food processor (more or less depending on the size of your processor).
2. Blend until smooth and creamy, stopping to scrape down the sides and give the mix a stir up to help it process.
3. It takes a while, but it does happen. If you don’t have a high powered processor (like me), watch the motor and give it a rest to keep it from overheating.

Have you read these posts?

1. homemade almond meal–the dry method
2. homemade almond milk and almond meal
3. gluten free almond meal and buckwheat pikelets
4. apple and almond meal muffins
5. choc caramel and almond slice