How To Make Cashew Butter

Hi, my name is Rob Cotton. Welcome to Leiths School of Food and Wine. We're an eatery and cooking school based in central London and Chiswick.

Not only do we run a year long diploma course for professional students and chefs, we also run a range of one day, one week, and evening class courses to give inspiration for furthering recipes and skills at home. I'm going to show you how to make cashew butter. For this, you will need 55 grams of softened butter.

It is really difficult to work with fridge-temperature butter. If you leave yours out for a half-hour/forty-five minutes, it should soften sufficiently to use it. You'll also need some icing sugar - 55 grams of this as well.

You will need some ground cashew nuts. It's very difficult to find ground cashew nuts so it's quite easy to do yourself using a food processor. Blend the nuts together until they form a fine powder.

Sieve it to get rid of any large lumps. Also, a little vanilla essence to add a little background flavor. Once the nuts have been ground, add them into the butter.

Then add in the icing sugar. It is very important to sieve the icing sugar to get rid of any large lumps. If you do see any lumps of icing sugar in the sieve, press them through with your hands and it should all break down quite evenly.

Depending on the strength of your vanilla extract, you might want to add a couple of drops. If it is a very weak vanilla extract, perhaps even half a teaspoon. Then, being very gentle to begin with so as not to put the icing sugar all over the work surface, gently combine together.

Initially, it looks as though it's not going to come together at all - you're just chasing the icing sugar around the bowl with the butter. But persevere and it will come together into a firm butter. Cashew butters, a sweetened version like this, can be used in French pastries or even in Danish pastries as well.

Quite actually it's coming together. The flouriness, or the lightness, of the icing sugar is disappearing into larger pieces of solid butter mixture. Once everything is combined together, it's quite soft.

Therefore, it's a good idea to wrap it up in cling film before putting it into the fridge and then chilling it. It takes about half an hour to chill the butter until it's really nice and solid. Once it's firm, it's much easier to cut into the size pieces that you need to use.

That's how you make cashew butter. .