Homemade Almond Butter

(pictured: finished almond butter in measuring cup)

Almond butter is so expensive to buy at the grocery store. I love almond butter, but really is it worth $10 bucks a jar? Well, it isn’t worth that to me anymore. I have a Vitamix blender and knew I could make nut butter in that behemoth of a machine. However, I wanted to find out if I could make nut butter in the food processor since I think people are more likely to have a food processor.

I was shocked at how quickly the almonds went from whole nuts to nut butter. I took pictures every few minutes so that you could see how quickly the process happened.



Pictured: two cups of almonds in a 14 cup Cuisinart food processor.



Pictured: almonds after 3 minutes of processing.



Pictured: Almonds after 4 minutes of processing

Pictured: Almonds after 5 minutes of processing, almost there......

Pictured: Nut butter after 7 minutes of processing. Wow, was that easy! I didn't even have to scrape the side of the machine.

Almond Butter
Makes approximately 7/8 of a cup or 14 tablespoons (a serving)

Ingredients:

2 cups of almonds
¼ teaspoon of kosher salt
2 teaspoons of agave – this is a function of how sweet you like your nut butter

Directions:

Put almonds in the food processor and turn it on. Puree for 3 minutes and add the kosher salt and agave. If the nut butter is coming up the sides of the bowl you may need to scrape the butter back to the bottom. I didn't need to, but you may. My food processor creamed the almonds in 7 minutes and 30 seconds.

Refrigerate until ready to use.

Nutritional Information (per tablespoon):

Amount Per Serving
Calories - 118.37
Calories From Fat (74%) - 87.13
Total Fat - 10.42g
Saturated Fat - 0.8g
Cholesterol - 0mg
Sodium - 33.91mg
Potassium - 148.34mg
Total Carbohydrates - 3.97g
Fiber - 2.39g
Sugar - 0.99g
Protein - 4.36g

Comments:

I was so surprised at how easily the food processor turned the nuts into butter. The first couple of minutes of processing I thought I was going to end up with nut crumbs, but I didn’t. Clearly the trick is to be patient and let the processor go for a while. I have a large food processor (14 cup) and think that more nuts would have probably worked better in the machine. The 2 cups did work, and doesn’t make so much nut butter that we can’t eat it in a week. I will definitely be making all my nut butters from now on. Making nut butters is ridiculously easy. Give it a try if you have a food processor.