Saturday, June 16, 2012

Recipe--Sea Salt and Honey Almond Butter


Several weeks ago, I read a post on the Tasty Kitchen blog which had a recipe for Sea Salt and Honey Almond Butter. I was quite intrigued, as it looked very easy and we had all of the ingredients, so I gave it a try.

We had bought almond butter from the store before, but it was plain, raw almond butter. I never really liked it that much, and I really only made this recipe for the sake of the almond butter lovers in the family. I was quite pleasantly surprised when I tried this recipe. I loved it! It was a great combination of sweet and salty. In fact, I almost wanted to hoard my little jar and eat it all myself. But I chose to share! J And now I’m sharing the recipe with all of you since it’s so good.

I’d like to eventually do a cost breakdown to see if it’s more cost effective to make our own almond butter than to buy it. But even if it’s more expensive, it makes a delicious treat from time to time!

Sea Salt and Honey Almond Butter

For this recipe you will need just 3 things: 2 cups Dry Roasted Almonds, 1 teaspoon Sea Salt, and 2 Tablespoons Honey.
If you start with raw almonds, roast them for a few minutes to dry them out. I used our toaster oven and it only took about 10 minutes. Make sure not to burn them!
Place almonds in a food processor and turn on.
The almonds will go through different stages. The first stage is basically finely chopped almonds.
The almonds will then ball up and start to curl over like the above picture. Just keep going!
The oil is starting to release from the almonds in this photo.
And we have almond butter!
IF YOU DON’T WANT TO RUIN YOUR ALMOND BUTTER, TAKE NOTE!!! I (mistakenly) thought that it would make sense to just blend in the honey and sea salt. DO NOT DO IT! For some reason, the honey causes the almond butter to ball up like cookie dough. I tried blending it more and more, but it just wouldn’t turn into smooth butter again. It was edible, but not spreadable. So PLEASE, put it in a bowl and STIR IN the honey and sea salt. J
I made a second batch of almond butter and it turned out much better as you can see from the above picture. J

You can adjust the sweet and salty combination to your liking. I stored my almond butter in a mason jar in the pantry. The recipe recommends storing the almond butter in the fridge, but we don’t usually follow that rule because it gets too hard. Ours stayed fine in the pantry for at least a week (by then it was already gone!) Enjoy!

2 comments:

Technoprairie said...

Do you think you could use kosher salt instead of sea salt?

7 Eagles said...

I think that would probably be fine, Technoprairie. What I would probably do is start with half the amount of salt required and work your way up from there just to make sure it doesn't get too salty.

~Bianca