Easy homemade staple recipes: How to make your own almond butter and almond flour or meal

Easy homemade staple recipes: How to make your own almond butter and almond flour or meal

• 3.11.2013

A couple super simple recipes/tutorials for you today, by request! Delicious, easy, good for ya, and cheaper than buying processed.

I love making my own raw almond butter and almond meal, at home in the Cuisinart. I Instagrammed this shot of my last batch of raw almond butter, and have mentioned it before on Twitter, and some of you requested the recipe!

(Update: FYI, this is the food processor we have. It's just the right size for everything I use it for and was a very good price. It can handle a lot of almond butter-making!)

Grinding your own almonds

We used to buy grind-your-own almond butter at the grocery store for $4.38/lb, which is pretty good (compared to $7-20/jar), but it's not hard to make your own, and you can use raw almonds rather than the dry roasted ones (more active nutrients raw) and add whatever you want! I eat lots of this stuff. ;) Recipe following, but first...

Homemade Almond Meal

When you grind up almonds in a food processor, the first stage (after chopped almonds) is almond meal. Homemade almond flour/almond meal is super easy and awesome! (Very useful in grain/gluten-free recipes and Paleo recipes, like this amazing Paleo meatloaf or lots of different baked goods!) Storebought almond flour is expensive but also can be rancid. The oils in the almonds oxidize when they're exposed to all the air and light the bags and bulk bins give them, so even the basic Bob's Red Mill isn't great unless it's super fresh. You'll want to store your almond meal (homemade or storebought) in the freezer or fridge, too, again to keep it from going rancid.

So, to make your own almond meal, you'll need:

• Raw almonds

Yeah, that's it. Instructions are:

• Put 1-2 cups of almonds in your food processor. You don't want to fill it too full or the bottom parts will grind more than the top.
• Pulse in food processor until the almonds are a mealy/course flour texture.
• Put in container, freeze! Use like you would any GF flour.

Amazing, right!?

Note that if you want finer meal/flour, you may have to make even smaller batches. Pulsing almonds transforms them from the chunky/chopped stage, to the mealy/floury stage, to a greasy/buttery stage--the longer you pulse them, the more you break them down including the fat. So if you pulse your meal too long, you'll end up with a big ball of greasy chunky almond butter--oops. So turn that into almond butter (see recipe below!) and start again! ;)

Homemade Almond Butter Recipe (Almond blend)

Now, while you have your food processor out and almond-ey, put another 1-2 cups of almonds in. For my almond butter, which is actually a blend of whatever I want at the time, this is my approximate recipe:

• 3-4 cups almonds (I make it in little batches and then combine together in a big glass storage container)
• 1 cup sunflower seeds, flax seeds, and/or cashews (always keep all of those in the fridge, too, to keep them from going bad!)
• 1/2-1 cup coconut oil (solid is fine, but might want to break it up into chunks with your spatula in the food processor)
• Sea salt to taste (I use a good amount! Full of minerals, good for adrenal function, and so tasty!)

Instructions for this are just a few steps past DIY almond meal. Here goes:

• Pulse the 1-2 cups of almonds in the food processor.
• Add in 1/2 or so of your other nuts or seeds (they're softer than almonds, so don't need to be pulsed as long)
• Keep food processing..........
• Check the contents, stir a little
• Pulse some more............ (it seriously takes like 5-10 minutes in the food processor)
• Add the coconut oil and salt. 
• Blend more! It should be a creamier texture. If you want it smoother, add more coconut oil.

That's it!!

Store in the fridge for ages and ages. I actually don't know how long it keeps because we eat it almost every day and go through it pretty fast.

That's it! Super easy DIY raw almond foods that are cheap and tasty and healthy.

*We eat a mostly Paleo-friendly diet, as shared here, but occasionally eat some peanuts (legumes, not nuts). I also love raw cashews (bought in bulk at Winco also, they've been super cheap this year!) but can get a tummy ache if I eat too many.
**Fun fact: raw cashews are actually lower in fat than raw almonds, but cashews are so often roasted in unhealthy processed oils and salted so they end up with more fat than your basic salted almond. But the fat from raw nuts is pretty good for you, so it doesn't really matter as long as they're not processed.