nutty butters

Practically everything that is store bought will have added sugar in it.  It frustrates me.  Yoghurts, drinks, spreads, sauces, practically everything.  Check the ingredients for a yoghurt with fruit in it.  Sugar will be the second or third ingredient.  Before the fruit.  I understand why food producers do it, but all the same, it just makes it very difficult for me to buy things, especially for Lily.

I used to be able to find a 100% peanut only peanut butter in the supermarkets here, but I can't seem to find it anywhere now.  So I thought about making my own nut butters.  They're not just good on toasts as spreads, but useful for dressings as well - see my very first post here.

Anyway, I settled on making a walnut butter after reading various blogs - this one has honey and cinnamon in it whilst this only has cinnamon in it.  This one only has walnuts and salt in it, which the one I decided to go for.  I think the oils that the other two recipes called for would bind the walnuts and would make it into more of a paste.  I wanted my walnut butter to be as unadulterated as possible, so I decided against adding any oils, honey or spices.  I did add a pinch of salt, which enhanced the taste.

This is what I ended up with:

 What you would have noticed from the photos of the butters from the different recipes I referred to is that my walnut butter looks very different from the other homemade walnut butters.  Which is interesting, and makes it all the more appealing in my opinion, but I can understand why the lack of uniformity would not work for a mass food producer.

Anyway - this is probably the easiest thing to make, and there's no real reason why you would ever want to buy nut butters from a shop again - apart from the cost of course.  500gms of walnuts cost me $35 ($7/100gms).  That made enough butter to fill a jar that once had about 450gms of peanut butter.  500gms of Planters peanut butter costs about $5 at the moment.  I don't know what walnut butters cost in the shop, but I suspect a lot less than $35.  You can see why making your own nut butters is not an attractive financial choice.   However, the way I see it, I don't eat a jar of peanut butter a day.  That jar of walnut butter will last us months.  And if I don't have to have the nasty added refined sugar in my food, then I'll pay extra for it.

Anyway:

Ingredients:
500g raw walnuts
A pinch of salt - to taste

Tools:

A food processor

How:

I soaked the walnuts for about half an hour.

Drained them, put them on a tray and into an oven at 180 degrees for about 20 minutes.

Let the walnuts cool, while you go out and get a food processor ;-)

Stick walnuts in food processor.

Process until it becomes a paste.  It really takes very little time (3 minutes maybe?) before it becomes this:

And another 1 min before it becomes this:

Add salt to taste.

This is what I got:

I think it's delicious.  Ben doesn't.  It needs sugar, he says.  Sigh...

Let me know how yours turned out.

xAJ

Update:  I used the walnut butter to make a salad dressing.  The ingredients I used for it were: walnut butter, soy sauce, sesame oil and honey.  (Note: I used a little bit too much sesame oil that it overpowered the taste of the walnut butter, so use very little).  I then made a salad like so:

Tossed it with the dressing, and served the salad with some half boiled eggs, like so:

Verdict:  Ben liked it.  Said I can make it again. :-) xAJ