Thu 04.10.08

Walnut Butter

I'm a little embarrassed at how much I like peanut butter. As a kid, I didn't eat many peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (and never, ever ate one of those peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches) but I used to put peanut butter on pretty much everything else: on apples, on cheese, on cookies, on ham, on bananas, on turkey, on ice cream, on waffles, on this Vietnamese dehydrated-shredded-pork jerky called ruoc, and, of course, right out of the jar.

My favorite were peanut butter and pickle sandwiches, though if we had pickle spears, I might've forgone the bread and just dipped the pickles right into the jar (I'm sure everyone else loved that). And the pickles had to be Kosher dills, not the sweet 'bread and butter' kind. I could go through a jar of dill pickles in a few days but would flat-out refuse to eat the bread-and-butters, a fact that I'm sure confused and annoyed my mom, who was unaware of this pickle bigotry.

I've since been able to be more discriminate in the stuff I put peanut butter on -- I have to act like an adult, after all -- but these sorts of things die hard. The other day I was eating some cauliflower pickles and decided, Yes, these would certainly benefit from some pb action. We didn't have any in the house, but we did have walnuts...

Ok, so in recipes that involve chopping nuts in a food processor or blender, there always seems to be a warning not to over-process the nuts, lest you end up with nut butter instead of chopped nuts. Which makes one wonder, Well, shit, if I have to TRY to NOT end up with walnut butter, how hard could this be? Those recipe writers must have some turbo-charged appliances, or maybe mine are particularly wimpy, but I ended up holding down the button on this mini-food processor for a solid fifteen minutes, well, well past the point of chopped nuts, which happened in about 10 seconds. The result was fairly good, but I could tell that the walnuts weren't ground finely as much as I'd like; you need it really fine so all of the nut oil gets released and the tinier solid bits can get suspended more easily in it, which would result in a creamier texture. Perhaps it's time to upgrade to a cuisinart.

Not that I'm complaining. The cauliflower/walnut butter combination was immensely satisfying, and, cuisinart or no, all I had to do was toast some nuts and hold down a button. Some additions I think are worth considering are cayenne pepper, honey, and molasses.

The real lesson to take from this is that George Washington Carver, who did all this without a food processor of any kind, was a total badass.