I know none of you have tested my granola guide, otherwise, I would have been awarded a medal by now.
You probably found the idea of combining honey, nuts, dried fruit, and rolled oats to be too daunting, so I’ll be sharing an even easier recipe. (Easy if you have a food processor; impossible if you don’t.)
Introducing… my nut butter how-to:
The trickiest part is finding a good nut dealer. I have three very conveniently located nut dealers, my favourite being The Nut King. In his kingdom raw almonds are offered at $8.99/pound.
Next, you will need a food processor. This will probably cost a lot more than $8.99/pound and it will definitely not be sold by the pound.
I use a five year old Black & Decker Power Pro. It’s the only food processor I’ve ever owned so I don’t know how it compares to the others.
As you can see, I don’t use the “Low” setting very often for I am an impatient person.
I have just barely enough patience to set my oven to 350° to give my raw nuts a 15-minute roasting, and another 15 minutes to cool down.
The amount to be roasted is dependent on your food processor’s capacity.
I do recommend dumping the nuts onto a metal pan straight from a glass jar to ease your neighbours into the noise that comes with making DIY nut butter. I once tried making chickpea flour using dried chickpeas and it was akin to making sand out of pebbles. It was hilarious, but probably only for my extremely deaf self.
As my food processor makes nut butter almost exclusively, I don’t bother washing the jar attachment. I’m cleverly lazy and just stick the jar in the fridge in-between uses.
When I first started making my own nut butter about three years ago, it would take less than 2 minutes in the processor for the nuts to go from ridiculously crunchy to smooth. I once forgot about the processor and inadvertently made nut oil; I ate soggy toast for breakfast for a week following that. Now with the worn blades (probably from that time I made chickpea flour), it takes about 5 minutes for the nuts to reach spreadability.
Don’t freak out when and if the nut dust gathers into a cluster and starts do-si-doing the blade column:
It’s all a part of the process.
I don’t understand why the nut butter recipes I’ve found online require the addition of other stuff. You could add chocolate, maple syrup, or spider eggs but this really is a one-ingredient wonder. Don’t fuck with a good thing.
You can give your family and friends the gift of homemade nut butter, but before you do so, you’ll want to spend some time on presentation. Colourful tulle might work great for Jordan almonds, but would be impractical for nut butter.
Homemade nut butter is definitely much more appreciated than homemade jam. Anytime I’ve ever been over somebody’s home, and they had homemade jam on hand, it would have been a gift from 3 Christmases ago. A jar of Toast Lotion gifted at Christmastime would never make it to the New Year, I promise you that.
This millennial is going to single-handedly destroy the jam industry with this very blog post.
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