Nut butter

A nut butter is a spreadable foodstuff made by grinding nuts 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 butter
• Almond butter
• Cashew butter
• Hazelnut butter
• Macadamia nut butter
• Peanut butter
• Pecan butter
• Pistachio butter
• Walnut butter

Nut butter

Peanut butter
Type	Spread
Main ingredients	Nuts
Cookbook: Nut butter

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 not considered nuts in a culinary sense:

• Pumpkin seed butter
• Sesame seed butter (usually called tahini)
• Soybean butter – made from soynuts (roasted soybeans)[1]
• Sunflower seed butter
• 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.

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) (e.g. Nutella). [3]