Homemade Sunflower Seed Butter
A fantastic alternative to commonly allergenic and and pricey nut butters, sunflower seed butter is so easy to make yourself at home! Packing a nutritional punch, shelled raw sunflower seeds are easy to buy in bulk, super affordable, and work great as a substitute for nut butter in most recipes. All you need is a food processor and 20 minutes for fresh sunflower seed butter whenever you want!
This recipe might as well be a love letter. I LOVE nut butters, particularly almond butter, which I had been making myself, and as you know can be prohibitively expensive especially when you can’t control yourself with it… Peanut butter is the obvious inexpensive alternative, but like many people, I don’t digest peanuts well (also FYI, they are legumes, not nuts). A friend introduced me to Sunbutter, which is good, but depending on where you live it can be hard to find. Upon eying the price of raw shelled sunflower seeds at my local bulk store, I realized how cheap they are! And homemade sunflower seed butter came into my life.
Sunflower seeds are a little more bitter than other seeds and nuts, which maybe explains why they are less popular, but with a small amount of unrefined sweetener, salt and oil, they turn into a smooth, silky, rich butter. Use sunflower seed butter in most of your baking, sauces, on toast, on fruit, pancakes or just on a spoon…the possibilities are endless!
Sunflower Seed Butter Fun Facts:
- Sunflower seeds contain chlorophyll (the green pigment in plant leaves). When combined with baking soda in baked goods, heated and then cooled, the chlorophyll transforms and turns a bright green color. Many of my recipes on this blog use sunflower seed butter, as it is my seed/nut butter of choice, so be prepared for your muffins to turn progressively greener in the days after baking ! This is perfectly safe. It is not mold or an alien fungus come to destroy you. This is just a fun and funky chemical reaction, which makes sunflower seed butter a bit less posh, but all the more fun!
- Packing a nutritional punch, sunflower seed butter is high in protein, healthy fats, fiber, vitamin E, B5, and a variety of minerals.
- Sustainable production - farming sunflower seeds uses a fraction of the water it takes to grow almonds, and are grown with less chemicals than many other nuts and seeds
- Affordability: raw sunflower seeds are super cheap compared to nut butters and accessible to buy in bulk or most grocery stores! I love nut butters, but they do hit the wallet pretty hard, so if you love baking nut-buttery goods, and don’t mind your baked goods looking a little garish green… sunflower seed butter is for you 😍
How to Make Homemade Sunflower Seed Butter:
Roast the seeds:
(Alternatively you can buy roasted sunflower seeds and skip this step, although most are roasted with refined oils, and after roasting have not been refrigerated to protect the fragile unsaturated oils)
1. Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Spread all of the raw shelled sunflower seeds onto a baking tray, making an even flat layer. Don’t worry if there are more sunflower seeds than can lay flat on the tray.
2. Once the oven has preheated, roast the sunflower seeds for 15 minutes, then remove from the oven. Toss the seeds so that the darker seeds are well distributed throughout, and return to the oven to bake for another 5 to 10 minutes until evenly roasted.
Make the sunflower seed butter:
3. Add roasted sunflower seeds to a food processor with the standard S blade attachment. Process on low until the seeds have turned into a sand-like powder that gets stuck to the sides of the food processor.
4. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, add the coconut oil, maple syrup and salt, and continue to process on low. You may need to scrap down the sides of the bowl a few times before it starts to combine well.
5. The mixture will start to create a big blob that almost seems to be stuck in the processor, this is normal! The blob phase will continue for another 5-10 minutes before it begins to break up.
6. Once the blob begins to break up, increase the processing speed to high and let it go until the butter is formed, and is smooth and silky. Scrape the sides once more to get any escaped bits of sunflower seed.
7. Taste the sunflower seed butter and adjust maple syrup and salt to taste, blending just until combined. Transfer to a 500ml jar and store in the refrigerator for up to 1 month (possibly longer, I always eat mine by then…). Enjoy on fruit, toast, inside smoothies, baked goods, sauces, and on a spoon straight into your mouth!
Homemade Sunflower Seed Butter
Ingredients:
- 3 cups raw, shelled sunflower seeds
- 1 tbsp coconut oil
- 1 tbsp maple syrup
- 1/2 tsp fine sea salt
Instructions:
- Preheat oven to 350ºF. Spread the raw shelled sunflower seeds onto a baking tray, making as even and flat a layer as possible
- Roast the sunflower seeds for 15 minutes in the preheated oven, remove from the oven, and toss so that the darker seeds are well distributed throughout. Return to the oven to bake for another 5 to 10 minutes until the seeds are evenly roasted
- (Optional: You can buy roasted sunflower seeds and skip this step, although most are roasted with refined oils, and have not been refrigerated to protect the fragile unsaturated oils)
- Add roasted sunflower seeds to a food processor with S blade attachment. Process on low until the seeds have turned into a sand-like powder that sticks to the sides of the food processor
- Scrape down the sides of the bowl, add the coconut oil, maple syrup and salt, and continue to process on low. You may need to scrap down the sides of the bowl a few times before it starts to combine well
- The mixture will start to create a big blob that almost seems to be stuck in the processor, this is normal! The blob phase will continue for another 5-10 minutes before it begins to break up
- Once the blob begins to break up, increase the processing speed to high until the butter is formed, and is smooth and silky.
- Taste the sunflower seed butter and adjust maple syrup and salt to taste. Scrape the sides once more to get any escaped bits of sunflower seed, and blend just until combined.
- Transfer to a 500ml jar and store in the refrigerator for up to 1 month (possibly longer, I always eat mine by then…). Enjoy on fruit, toast, inside smoothies, baked goods, sauces, and on a spoon straight into your mouth!
