Currently, there are 10 jars of nut butter sitting in my cabinet.
1. Cinnamon Raisin Swirl from Peanut Butter and Company
2. Mighty Maple from Peanut Butter and Company
3. Nutella – yes, that counts, hazelnuts!
4. Unsalted cashew butter, store brand
5. Pumpkin Spice from Peanut Butter and Company
6. Extra Crunchy Skippy
7. Smooth Jif
8. Brownie Batter from D’s Naturals
and now, chocolate protein walnut butter and plain walnut butter
It started with an email from The Peanut Principle telling me about their year of sale or coupon, regardless, I sighed because 1. I have a lot of jars in the cabinet and 2. I didn’t really need to spend the money on more right now. JP and I were getting dinner ready and I asked him if he thought we would have time to try to make our own this weekend.
He immediately turned to the cabinet and grabbed a full bag of whole shell walnuts and said “could we use this?” Yep. Yep, we could.
So I looked online so see if there was any magic to making nut butter and you know what, there’s not. So we played around and gave it a go.
Here’s What You’ll Need
- Food processor
- 1 to 2 cup of nuts, unsalted
- optional – salt
- optional – protein powder, we used Chocolate Cupcake from PEScience
- optional – Hershey’s chocolate syrup
- optional – vanilla extract
Directions
- Pick your nut! I know, I know, but you need to decide what butter you want. I chose walnuts.
- If your nuts are already shelled, you can add between 1 to 2 cups to your food processor. If they’re not shelled, shell them and make sure that all the piece of shell and inner skin are removed.
- Pulse your food processor on chop for a few minutes before switching to grind. If your food processor doesn’t have multiple settings or has numbered settings you will want to processor the nuts until they are smooth. Scraping the sides every now and then to ensure that all pieces of what may be meal now continue to be ground down.
- When ground to desired smoothness, pour into a jar and store in the fridge.
To make protein infused nut butter
- Make the recipe above and divide in half then add 1 teaspoon vanilla extract.
- Once vanilla is blended in, add a scoop of protein of your choice slowly. We used chocolate frosted cupcake by PEScience, which will cause the nut butter to dry out slightly. I believe all powders would cause the nut butter to dry out though, not just the whey casein blend.
- To combat the dryness of added protein, add a little bit of water. I added 1/2 a tablespoon of water at a time up to about 2 tablespoons of water.
- To enhance the chocolatey-ness of the nut butter or because I wanted to add chocolate sauce… I added 1 tablespoon of Hershey’s syrup and blended.
Nutrition for a 28g serving of protein walnut butter using 100g of blended nut butter: 12.5F/3.6C/7.1P
*Notes*
I would wait until the next day to put add-ins into the nut butter because this gives the mix time for the oils to separate, which may help with mixing in the protein. Since it is naturally and minimally made, we have had to mix both butters before every use so that oils are mixed thoroughly.
