Making homemade nut butter with properly prepared nuts is delicious, nutritious, highly digestible, and fairly simple if you have the right tools. When making nut butter you get to choose your ingredients and don’t have to worry about the high amount of processed sugar and unnatural salt along with other harmful ingredients that are added to most nut butters. We also hear a lot about peanut butter recalls these days, and making it yourself will decrease this risk.

The first step to make sure the nut butter is highly nutritious and easily digestible is to soak your nuts for at least seven hours in salt water to neutralize the anti-nutrients that make nuts so hard on our digestive systems. These are then dehydrated or dried out in an oven to be enjoyed or turned into nut butter.

Since you get to choose your ingredients when you make nut butter, the finished product can be very unique. I highly recommend following our recipe as a base only, knowing that you can add more fat, salt, or sweetener at the end to get your own favorite recipe. Since we have been slowly decreasing our sweeteners this recipe may not be sweet enough for some, but it’s perfect for us.

At this time we are sourcing native, raw pecans in bulk, and since this is what I have on hand, this is what we use. It makes a darker, richer nut butter. I have also used peanuts, walnuts, cashews, and almonds, and those are great too. To keep this creation very healthy, we use Real Salt that has not been stripped of it’s minerals like most salts on the market and honey or maple syrup for a natural sweetness. We always avoid vegetable oils and have found that butter (especially since we are producing a lot on our farm) works the best for use. Sally Fallon has a recipe that uses coconut oil, which may be a great option for you too!