Cheap Eats - Homemade Coconut Butter

I'll admit to sometimes get a bit down at how expensive some of these amazing paleo recipes seem to be all over the net. 2 cups of almond butter, a whole cup of coconut cream concentrate or coconut butter, etc. etc. Oy it feels impossible sometimes! I have a smaller budget than many with a family this size and am trying to do the impossible like have paleo treats, things like that.

That brings me to my desire to try and learn to make changes to some of the more expensive recipes and make certain things myself.

Which brought me to.... homemade coconut butter.

I've bought coconut butter before. It's not insanely expensive but out of my range for making thing like cookies for my family. I will say it's DELICIOUS. I ate the last jar with just a spoon. It's smooth but a little gritty and sweet without sweetener and just decadent and yummy. It's not crazy expensive and worth it to treat yourself with a jar for nibbling. (pictures are links to buy them if you want to)

$9.49

And what about this stuff? I'm not an agave fan so I may just make my own this week. But MAN that looks yummy eh?

Basically coconut butter is coconut ground into a smooth butter. I figured it can't be THAT hard to make right? I used this coconut: from Tropical Traditions. I get it from our local co-op and with tax and whatnot it's $10.

I didn't do the food blogger thing and figure exactly how many cups are in my package, etc. to give you the true cost of my homemade coconut butter. If you can forgive me, keep reading, if not, I'll try better next time. All I will say price wise is that I didn't even notice that I took any out of my bag of coconut. So 6 ounces of coconut butter and I didn't even notice that I used coconut. My guess would be I could make a couple of quarts with that $10 bag.

I started with 2 cups of shredded coconut.

It is really as simple as processing in the food processor. Really. That's it! After about 4 minutes I had to scrape down a little. Every couple of minutes after that I scraped it down. After 10 minutes it was smooth and creamy and............. homemade coconut butter!

I ended up with 6 ounces of coconut butter. Warm from the food processor it's smooth and soft.

A while later in our cool house it was solid.

You can stick the jar in warm water to soften it to use in recipes, etc. Tomorrow I'm going to grab some Enjoy Life Chocolate Chips at Kroger and try a recipe with the coconut butter.

I'm on a mission to try and figure out the cheapest ways to enjoy treats for the kids. Hope this helps someone!