Recipe #2 - Nut (Almond & Cashew) Butter

I ended up trying the Coconut Flax bread recipe again yesterday and adding more liquid. The result was a significantly more edible bread. I will probably wait a bit to post the recipe because I'm still going to work with it a bit.

In the meantime I decided that instead of putting regular butter on the bread (instead of Country Crock) I should probably make some different nut butter to use as a spread. I found a recipe online, and it was so easy, I was sure that I could not screw this up...

The first thing that you need are unsalted, roasted nuts. I was able to easily find raw, unsalted nuts, so I had to roast them myself. The nuts I chose were almonds and cashews.

Raw Almonds

Raw Cashews

To roast the nuts, preheat your oven to 375F and bake for 4 minutes, give a little stir and bake for 4 more minutes. Be careful not to let the nuts burn. The roasting time can vary depending on the moisture that was already in the nuts, so keep that in mind, and keep an eye on your nuts.

Roasted Almonds

Roasted Cashews

The next step is to let the nuts cool. I found that leaving them on the baking sheet on the kitchen table under the ceiling fan worked well to get them cooled quickly.

Once your nuts have cooled, the online recipe I found said to process them in your food processor, and add a little oil as necessary to get a creamy texture for the butter.

Either the internet lied, or I have a crap food processor. I kept grinding the roasted nuts, but all I got was nut powder. I ended up adding olive oil to the very granulated nut powder so that it would start to form the butter.

Cashew Butter

The cashew butter turned out better than the almond butter, but both have a very grainy texture. There is one redeeming quality though, the flavor is excellent. I have both in jars in my fridge waiting to be spread on something, probably the paleo pancakes that I'm going to try to make tomorrow.

Overall I would call this a 55% success. The thing it let me know is that I definitely need a good blender to make some of these paleo recipes, and I can't think of a better one then the Blendtec. I want that for my Christmas Present.

Of course if I do get the Blendtec, then I will have to make sure that my husband doesn't do something like this:

This is how the cashew butter turned out.