Quote:
Originally Posted by jellydisney
I've never heard of almond butter. What is it? Is it like peanut butter?
Judging from the responses, maybe I'm better off not knowing....
Almond Butter is to Peanut butter, what a McDonald's hamburger is to Kobe beef (I'm a bit biased, of course), but nut butters like peanut butter is a nut paste. They can contain "just nuts," or they can contain other ingredients (sugar, salts, emulsifiers....) so you have to read the labels just like anything else. The grind your own contains only nuts (which may be salted or not).
I saw my first nutbutter (other than peanut butter) in my first trip to a healthfood store in college. It looked like peanut butter with dark flakes (almond butters come in various shades of brown, with or without the the dark flakes - depending on how much the nuts are roasted, and whether the skin of the almond is removed). I was fascinated, but $7 a jar was pretty intimidating, so I didn't try it until years later (when I found a teeny, tiny jar for $4). As someone who was never a peanut butter fan, I had found absolute heaven, and I ended up trying all of the nut butters I could find.
Fresh ground peanut butter - this is good, but can't be compared to store peanut butter. The texture (a little dryer) and even the taste (more like a handful of roasted peanuts) is completely different - it's the only peanut butter I really like.
Cashew - This stuff is the gold standard of the nut butters I have tried. Just absolutely the most amazing stuff on the planet. Don't even think of trying it if you ever want to be able to choke down peanut butter ever again. It's so expensive, that I was able to control myself only by thinking of how much each tablespoon cost - I'd warm the jar in the microwave, and spread the cashew butter as thin as I possibly could so the jar would last as long as possible. Cashew butter is usually $12 or more per pound. Keeping that in mind, does help.
Macadamia nut butter - I had high hopes for this one, as macadamia nuts are my absolute favorite nuts (I only buy these in the tiny, single-serving 1 oz packages (and only one or two at a time). The nut butter though was not pleasant. It was much oilier than other nut butters (which makes sense, because macadamia are one of, if not the fattiest nuts), but the oil didn't stir into the nut butter very well, and it had a strange "old" almost rancid taste. I've never been brave enough to try it since, but I think it may have been an inferior brand - or because it was so expensive, it had sat on the shelf too long (there wasn't an expiration date on the jar - but this was probalby 20 years ago, so shelf stable products didn't always have a use by date).
Almond butter - Still pretty expensive $7 to $12 per pound (7 in the jar, and 12 to grind yourself at the grocery). If you like roasted almonds, you'll love almond butter. When I worked in the juvenile detention center, the jail would send over huge cans (a gallon or more) of almond butter (apparently, there was a government surplus of almond butter that year). The kids HATED it, because it wasn't peanut butter. We had to eat with the kids, and weren't supposed to eat anything that the kids couldn't have (unless we could make sure they didn't see us eating it - when I was on Nutrisystem I had to prove to my bosses that there was no way that the kids would be jealous of the food I was eating - luckily that wasn't hard to prove with Nutrisystem - it made the jail food look good). But before I was dieting, though I ate a lot of almond butter at work. I joked (but was serious) in staff meetings that I would gladly "trade" the almond butter for twice the amount in peanut butter so the kids wouldn't have to "suffer" any longer. Unfortunately, not legal to do so, besides I would have had to stand behind the director of the facility and all of the senior staff members (assuming we went by rank and seniority and not had to fight it out).
You can make your own nut butters in the food processor, but my only attempt to do so with almonds, failed miserably. I didn't use any additional oil, so it came out more like almond meal, than almond butter. Almond meal makes a great coating for oven-"fried" chicken, by the way. I later learned that for many nuts, a small amount of additional oil is needed to make the nuts into nut butter. If you can't find the "matching" oil, walnut or peanut butter is often recommended.
Oh, I should also mention tahini - it's not a nut butter, but a seed butter. Ground sesame seeds. I believe it comes in both raw and toasted. The raw is white and has a creamier, looser texture than nut butters. A lot of people love it, but I didn't like it at all. I found it too bitter.