Tuesday, August 06, 2013

Sunflower Butter

Today is my second day off in a row. It's beautiful. On my first day off I do things like sleep in and catch up on laundry and chores. On my second day off I have less direction... Or multiple directions...

Today I sewed, played piano, accepted a PRN job at a nearby nursing home, weeded in the garden, shopped for deals on toilet paper on Amazon, ate strawberry ice cream, and organized the sewing closet and linen closet. When my organizing spree led me to the pantry I found a jar of these:

via
Wow I am never going to use these up. And I wondered ... can I make sunflower butter?

I have watched enough infomercials to know that if you have a powerful food processor or blender, you can even blend up roasted almonds. I don't have a food processor, but I have this Kitchenaid blender (except I got it on a sale for $49). Amazon says it has .9 horsepower -- which I figured should be enough to blend up some sunflower seeds.

Into my blender I poured in about 1.5 cups of dry roasted sunflower seeds. They turned into a "flour" consistency right away, but looked very dry.

A quick google search led me to Detoxinista, who shows in her post how to make almond butter. First the flour stage -- keep blending! The nuts have to heat up for the oil to come out and create the butter texture.

I blended for one minute on, half a minute off so I didn't overheat my blender. Repeating this for several cycles, the mixture started to get warm and less dry as the oil started coming out of the sunflower seeds.

I added 1 T. coconut oil because I was impatient waiting for the sunflower butter to smooth out.

I put the final product in a glass jelly jar and am storing it in the refrigerator. 1.5 cups of sunflower seeds turned into about 1 cup of sunflower butter.

Since my original seeds were salted, the nut butter tastes significantly saltier than normal peanut butter, but I like it with apples or celery. Before eating, I warm the nut butter in the microwave until it softens up. Next I want to try almond butter!

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