One example is my recent search for the best way to make fine nut butters. My super powered blender does quite well for oily nuts such as macadamia and pine, but for drier nuts like sunflower, almonds and sesame, I would need to use another carrier oil to coax the blade to run smoothly. These nut butters are generally chunkier than store bought versions too. Those of us with blenders without the stirrers might find this work even more difficult. My blenders are a vitamix and a cheap commercial blender with stirrers which are very good for performing this task already...but the result is nowhere near the runny refinement of my stone-mill.
I remember my childhood days when I watched the neighbours in the kampung grind down rice between two giant granite mortars. I searched the net for modern day equivalents and found this thing called the melanger (about $700 USD) which looks suspiciously like the wet-stone grinders that our Indian friends use for grinding down wet rice for thosai and idli. So, I scooted to little India and got one of those motorised wet-grinders and brought it home ($200) with excitement and trepidation. ("Grind nuts? Noooo, we don't use it like that..." the store-keeper at Karthika exclaimed.)
The first nuts I used is the oily macadamia - it jammed the grinder big time. I took out all the nuts, ran them through the food processor and then trickled them into the stone grinder - I had to wait for quite some time, but after twenty minutes or so, the result was a dream ;-).
I tried hulled sesame next - dry at first but with patience, but glistening smoothness at the end. Then the pumpkin seeds...and then mixtures like black sesame and macadamia, pumpkin and hulled sesame etc....all perfect as perfect can be. These are really better than store bought - I can make these with sprouted nuts and seeds that are free from enzyme inhibitors and oxalates....;-)
Woohoo....wonderful to be in potpourri Singapore.
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| Pumpkin seed butter |
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