Review: Homemade Sunflower Seed Butter

I have a fondness for trying interesting things in the kitchen. If I find a recipe that makes me squint my eyes, tilt my head, and say "hmm" out loud,  then I probably have to try it. The most recent such recipe was for chocolate cupcakes with a basil buttercream frosting. Basil buttercream? Hmm. Only with high risk is there is high reward (or so they say). The recipe before that was an oatmeal cookie recipe with old fashioned and steel-cut oats plus hazelnuts and chocolate. Yes, please. But steel cut oats in cookies? Hmm. And the recipe before that was for cookies made with sunflower seed butter and chocolate-covered sunflower seeds from Bakerita. A long time ago, my grandma bought my mom Trader Joe's chocolate-covered sunflower seeds. Much like me, she thought hmm, and decided to purchase them. It's really the only logical solution because otherwise you'd never know if it's a "good" hmm or a "bad" hmm. I'd just seen chocolate covered sunflower seeds at a local market. It was surely meant to be.

So, these cookies used oats (I love oats in cookies), chocolate covered sunflower seeds (which made the cookies adorable. Go to the Bakerita link to look for yourself), and a weird and whacky ingredient I'd never heard of: "Sunbutter." I learned that Sunbutter is sunflower seeds turned into a nut (well, in this case, seed) butter. Was it worth paying over $5 for a jar of Sunbutter to try a hmm recipe? No. Low and behold, I turned to the internet and found a recipe for homemade sunflower seed butter from Tessa Domestic Diva. "Ok", I told myself, "I can do this."

Along with my chocolate-covered sunflower seeds, I picked up a lot of unsalted, not roasted sunflower seeds (and pepitas, hazelnuts, wheat germ, and whatever other fun things I found in the bulk foods section). I pulled out my food processor from storage by myself. This was no easy task. Look how well Dad stuffed all of my worldly possessions into my storage box. Of course the food processor wasn't in the front. But thankfully my Kitchen Aid was, so Kitty/Sir Mix-a-Lot made her/his way into our kitchen months ago.

Sunflower seeds of raw and chocolate varieties? Check! Food processor? Check! Ok, the sunflower seed butter wasn't all that easy. The problem may have been that I followed the manufacturer's instructions to process only 1 cup of nuts for nut butters at a time. I couldn't quite get the movement within the machine that I was hoping for, which prompted me to add oil before I was supposed to add oil. That probably also lead to me adding a heck of a lot more oil than was called for in the recipe. That's an "Abby-oops."I used honey as my sweetener and added it until my sunflower seed butter tasted semi-sweet. I forgot to add any salt. Once it was done though, it was fine. Not as creamy as Skippy, but that's to be expected. While it's the only peanut butter I like, I find it hard to believe that it actually comes from peanuts. Sunflower seed butter creation step? Successful.

The next step was easy. Making cookie dough is usually foolproof if you follow directions. And after plenty of Abby-oopses, I've learned that you can mix the ingredients in pretty much any order and still end up with a cookie. The coolest part of making the cookie dough was that an hour later, the cookie batter on the spatula was lime green. The recipe notes that sunflower seed butter can turn green when oxidized. I was not expecting it to be such a lovely hue. Chemistry! The cookies looked beautiful and tasted delicious. The flavor was distinct from peanut butter cookies, but I can't quite put my finger on the flavor. If you've eaten a bunch of raw sunflower seeds, imagine that, but with butter, sugar, and other delicious things.

Ok, fast forward a week. There was still a half cup of homemade sunflower seed butter in the refrigerator. It was not getting any fresher and I wasn't quite sure how long it would last. I once learned why Salmonella is so problematic in peanut butter and knew that sunflower seed butter shared the key property for optimum Salmonella outbreak (see, being a microbiologist can be useful outside of the lab). How could I use up the rest? I didn't want to make more cookies because of the price of the chocolate-covered sunflower seeds. Though in retrospect, I could have used sunflower seeds (maybe even the roasted & salted variety) plus chocolate chips, but I didn't think of that. Hours of "Googling the web" brought me upon a recipe for The Fit Cookie's Maple Sunbutter Granola. 

Oats, flaxseed, coconut, sunflower seeds, sunflower seed butter, and maple syrup? Sounded too good to be true. In reality, those are the only ingredients I used because I forgot to add the salt and vanilla (and deliberately left out raisins because I don't think they have  place in, well, anything). Oh my! This is good stuff. It even clumped a little bit and started to harden without having to cool forever. I was very impressed with this recipe, which surprised me. Peanut butter granola didn't sound like it would taste good, so why would sunflower seed butter granola taste good? I don't know. Maybe because I'm not used to how sunflower seed butter is supposed to be used (for example, peanut butter is for bananas, toast, PB&Js, peanut sauce, chocolate ice cream, crepes, cookies, and ants on a log). Without expectations, things often taste better. Really, this is a great recipe and I plan on using the last 1/4 cup of sunflower seed butter on a second batch.

SUNFLOWER SEED BUTTER: The Verdict

Worth the effort for unique snacks. Next time, I would probably use my 1 cup food processor and make a smaller batch to make just enough for a recipe. Because it's not perfectly creamy, I don't think I'd like it on toast or crackers, so I wouldn't really want leftovers. Now that I know how easy it is to make, I don't need to buy it. The only perk to buying it would be that the creamiest texture is undoubtedly store-bought. Luckily, when using it in recipes, a grainier texture doesn't matter!