Three Delicious Homemade Nut Butters
Perfectly balanced and delightfully flavored recipes for Brazil nuts, pumpkin seeds, and hazelnuts
Nuts are a linchpin of vegan cuisine: high in protein, luxurious in flavour, entirely practical in application. A scattering of cashews makes your stir-fry both a complete meal and a good time, almond butter lends instant opulence, and peanut butter on toast is a perpetual lifesaver meal.
As it turns out, not all nuts are created equal. Now, eating plant-based can be as complex or straightforward a journey as you want it to be, but generally the territory comes with a heightened awareness of our food’s origins. Keywords that might previously have flown over my head now ping in my ears — sustainability, water-intensive crops, Fair Trade, deforestation. Knowing that almond trees guzzle water and are mostly grown in drought-troubled places now gives me pause when I reach for the almond butter. Finding out the bulk of the world’s cashews are processed by women in human rights-violating conditions makes me feel uneasy about the inexpensive cashews that I would normally buy as a matter of course. And as for that one chocolate hazelnut spread: I was never a fan anyway. But the thought of how the palm oil in it contributes massively to deforestation and the death of animals leaves a bitter taste in my…
