Homemade Nut and Seed Butters

Making your own nut and seed butter is one of the best decisions you could ever make! In my health journey over the past year, I have learned a lot. One of the hardest lessons was learning how bad my beloved peanut butter was for me 😢 I’m not going to get deep into all the specifics- you can check out the good and the bad about legumes here https://authoritynutrition.com/legumes-good-or-bad/  – but I will say the amount of bloating that I was struggling with before finding out this information has greatly decreased. I have pretty much cut out all legumes from my diet, except for the occasional scoop of black beans, handful of edamame or bowl of chili with beans- but those come few and far between and I definitely feel it when I do indulge😳

Once I decided to cut out peanut butter and started replacing it with almond butter (store bought), I fell in love! But then I started reading labels and seeing how much sugar was in everything… And how many ingredients it took to make such a simple thing…  So I decided to make my own. So incredibly easy! So good for you! One ingredient! Well, you can add more, but we’ll get to that later 😊 I don’t think I’ll ever pay for nut butter again.

I buy my nuts and seeds from Sprouts because they have great sales all the time! I typically just buy unsalted dry roasted nuts for my nut butters, but if you want to be super duper uber healthy, you can buy the raw organic nuts, soak them, dry them, roast them yourself, but I just don’t have the time and patience required. 

The only other thing you need is a good food processor. You could attempt to do this in a blender but it’d probably take 3 times as long and it may be the last thing you make in it… This is the one that I have and it’s a beast! I love it and use it all the time! 

The pictures that I’m going to share with you are from the sunflower seed butter I made the other day. I made this specifically for my Trail Mix Energy Bites that I will post the recipe for very soon! The sunflower seeds turned into a perfectly creamy butter in about half the time that it usually takes me to get almonds to do so. All I did was pour about 2 cups of seeds into my food processor and turned it on.

This is what it looked like after the first minute.

This is what it looked like at 3 minutes. The fat is starting get warm and emulsify.

 

Then at 5 minutes, it starts to look like butter

I really wanted this batch to be smooth and creamy, so I added a tablespoon of coconut oil.

 

And turned it back on until it reached a total of 8 minutes being processed. Voilà! Sunflower seed butter!

I do the same thing with almonds. Two cups of nuts and blend until it reaches your desired consistency, scraping down the sides as needed. Almond butter typically takes about 15 minutes. And while I don’t usually add coconut oil to the almond butter, you could add a tablespoon of local honey and/or a teaspoon of sea salt to enhance the flavor.

I wanted to try something different a few months ago and made a “cookie batter” cashew butter that ended up tasting like gingerbread cookies! So good!!! Here’s the recipe that I used for that:

Start with 2 cups of dry roasted, unsalted cashews and when they reach the “butter stage” and you only need to few more minutes to get it to the perfect consistency, add in

• 1 tablespoon molasses
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon each of ground ginger, nutmeg and cloves
• (Optional) 1 tablespoon coconut oil

There are endless possibilities of flavor, nut/seed combinations! I’ll be sure to share any more that I try and I hope that you will share with me, too! Let me know if you try any of these recipes and what you think!

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