Nut butter

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Nut butter

Peanut butter
Type	Spread
Main ingredients	Nuts, seeds or drupes

A nut butter is a spreadable foodstuff made by grinding nuts, seeds or drupes into a paste. The result has a high fat content and can be spread like true butter, but is otherwise unrelated. Nut butters include:

• Acorn
• Almond
• Cashew
• Hazelnut
• Macadamia
• Peanut
• Pecan
• Pistachio
• Walnut

The almond, cashew, macadamia, peanut, pecan, pistachio and walnut are not true nuts in a botanical sense. However, because they are considered nuts in a culinary sense, their crushed spreads are called nut butters. Similar spreads can also be made from seeds that are not considered nuts in a culinary sense:

• Pumpkin seed
• Sesame seed (usually called tahini)
• Soybean – made from soynuts (roasted soybeans)^[1]
• Sunflower seed
• Hummus or chickpea spread

Nut and seed butters have a high content of protein, fiber, and essential fatty acids, and can be used to replace butter or margarine on bread or toast. Nut butters can also be used as dipping sauces for apples and bananas, toppings for oatmeal or smoothie bowls, and ingredients in Asian sauces.

The grinding of nuts into a paste has a long history. Almond paste or marzipan was highly prized by the caliphs of Baghdad. The Kitab al-Tabikh or Book of Recipes was a collection of recipes from the court of ninth-century Baghdad. The most esteemed sweet was lauziinaq, an almond paste much like marzipan.^[2] Hazelnut butter was mixed with chocolate to overcome shortages during the Napoleonic wars and WWII, which led to the invention of gianduja chocolate spreads (e.g. Nutella).^[3]