The first recipes in my cookbook Eating for Pleasure, People & Planet are for seed and nut butters. Peanut butter is delicious, yes, but homemade mixed seed and nut butters can be nutritionally superior and just as yummy; they’re also a great way to use up store-cupboard ingredients. In the book I include recipes for hemp, pumpkin and brazil nut butter, homemade “Nutella” and amlou, a Moroccan almond, honey and argan oil spread, and the method for making most if not all of them is very similar.
Get creative, put on your chef’s hat and come up with your own simple combinations using whatever you have available. Virtually all nuts and seeds will work, but, that said, some nuts, such as pine nuts or poppy seeds, are especially intense and can also be expensive, so use those in moderation and mainly to flavour your spread.
Seed and nut butter
Exotic seed and nut butters are eyewateringly expensive to buy, so it’s handy that they’re so simple to make at home. If you’ve got a buildup of nuts and seeds getting close to their use-by date, roasting and blending them into nut butter is a surefire way to prolong their life and make sure they get eaten. You can also create your own nutrient-rich combinations. For example, I’ve got an excess of sesame seeds from a bulk purchase I made last year, so I’m going to use them to make a batch of tahini with honey and cocoa, which is one of my favourite sweet spreads.
Makes 1 large jar
At least 300g of nuts or seeds
Put your chosen nuts and seeds on a baking tray and roast in a preheated oven at 200C (180C fan)/390F/gas 6 for eight minutes.
Remove and leave to cool fully, then blend for one to five minutes, depending on your blender’s strength. At first, the nuts and seeds will just chop up, but they’ll then turn into a paste and, finally, as the oils begin to extract and emulsify, you will end up with “butter” (if for some reason the nuts don’t naturally turn into butter, add a dash of oil to help them along).
If you want to make crunchy nut butter, set aside some of the roast nuts, blitz them separately into large chunks, then stir through the smooth nut butter.