How to Make Homemade Coconut Butter

Homemade Coconut Butter is a breeze easy to make in your food processor or high-powdered blender in just minutes and once you make, you'll wonder where it's been all your life. You only need one ingredient to make it, but there are lots of fun variations to experiment with as well.

It tastes great on its own but there are also loads of ways to use it. Let the homemade coconut butter making begin.

Have you seen coconut butter in recipes and wondered what it is? Or do you use it often and are just tired of paying so much for it?

Either way, you're going to love this recipe.

Let me introduce you to coconut butter and show you how easy it is to make this otherwise very pricey pantry staple for yourself.

What Is Coconut Butter?

I still remember the day that I found out what coconut butter is. I was looking at a recipe that I wanted to make and noticed that “coconut butter” was one of the ingredients. I didn't know what it was, but had to find out.

What I found out first is that it cost a mere $13.99 for a “giant” 16 oz. container on the first website I checked. Wow. Oddly, the only ingredient in that jar was — coconut!

It turns out that coconut butter is just dried coconut that's processed to make a thick butter like nut butter, but it's hard at room temperature.

Coconut butter is useful by itself, but it's used in a low-carb/keto recipes as well.

What's Best for Making Coconut Butter — Food Processor or High Speed Blender?

The high-speed blender wins hands down and here's why.

The first time I tried making coconut butter, I used a food processor. The post that I got the recipe from said that it should take about 12 minutes of whirring in total.processor. Well, I had a heavy duty processor at the time and could make four batches of Savory Hummus at a time, yielding a creamy smooth product in about 1 minute.  So I figured that if any food processor was going to be able to make coconut butter, mine would.

Try as I might, it didn't work well. Now, I've done it since then and so it's possible, but just be careful about burning your food processor out because it can happen.

Meanwhile, making coconut butter in a high-speed blender like a Vitamix (you can also order one on Amazon), is a piece of cake. And though the price of these blenders is a little steep, once you see how much you can make with them, you'll see that it's totally worth it.

How Much Can You Save?

One 16 oz. jar of coconut butter costs approximately $13.99.  One pound of medium unsweetened coconut, at the time of publishing this post, cost me approximately $1.75. That's more than an 87% savings.

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How to Use

There are so many ways to use homemade coconut butter. How about…

• Spread it on crackers, bread or toast.
• Blended into smoothies.
• Added to hot drinks like coffee, a coffee substitute, or hot chocolate.
• Use in recipes calling for coconut butter, like Chocolate Avocado Truffles and these No Bake Brownies.
• Stirred into hot cereal like oatmeal or Cream of Rice.
• Added to curries for more richness.
• As a frosting by adding some coconut oil and sweetener.
• As a fat substitute in recipes. It does need to be softened first and will make your recipe a little stiffer, but it can work.
• As a substitute for nut butters in many recipes, depending on how much you're replacing and what the recipe is.
• Drizzled on ice cream to make a simple “magic shell” coating.
• Eat it with a spoon. Our oldest LOVES it like this.

Storage

Coconut butter keeps really well and will likely store just fine in your pantry for several months. Most likely you won't have it around that long, however.

There is no need to keep it in the fridge, and in fact, if you do, you will have hard time eating it since it gets incredibly hard at low temperatures.

Recipes That Use Coconut Butter

Here are some tasty recipes where you can use coconut butter.

• 3 Ingredient Shortbread Crisp: This really uses only 3 ingredients, and none of them is a packaged mix. Don't those “3 ingredient” recipes drive you nuts when one ingredient (or more) is a boxed mix that has a gazillion ingredients?
• Coconut Butter Fat Bombs: 3 flavors of simple healthy keto treats.
• Chocolate Avocado Truffles: Super easy and delicious. And healthy. You won't believe these are made with avocado!

Recipe Notes

After having trouble with this working sometimes and not working at other times, I have a few tips to help you get PERFECT coconut butter anytime.

1.  Start with less coconut.  This works more consistently if you start with only about 4 cups of shredded coconut.  Make that into a butter and then add 1 cup of additional coconut at a time, blending to a butter with the addition of each cup.
2. Make sure that your blender is COMPLETELY dry.  Even a little bit of water causes the coconut butter to not form properly.

The coconut butter will come out of your Vitamix quite warm and runny, but it will harden up as you let it sit.  If you need to speed up the process, just put it into your fridge or freezer.

Your coconut butter will become spreadable around 76 degrees, but you can use a knife or apple corer to get it out of the jar if it's colder than that in your home.

NOTE:  Occasionally, for some reason, the coconut butter just doesn't quite work out well.  If that ever happens to you, just add a few things to the blender and you can have these fabulous No-Bake Coconut Cookies instead!

Variations

Here are some fun flavors to try by adding the following to the coconut before it's done processing, or after while it's still liquidy.

• Spiced Honey: Honey plus any of the following: cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cloves, ginger, and salt.
• Maple Vanilla: Maple syrup, vanilla extract or vanilla powder, and a dash of salt.
• Chocolate/Cacao: Cocoa or cacao powder and salt. Stir in some cacao nibs after processing for a chocolatey crunch.
• Nutty: Add some nuts to the mix. Anything goes!
• Pumpkin Spice: Pecans and pumpkin pie spice.
• Fruity: Dried fruits like goji berries, raisins, dried cranberries, and more.
• Toasted: Toast the coconut first for depth of flavor and add some salt while you're at it.

Special Diet Notes

For Those With Nut Allergies: Note that coconut is not actually a nut, but some allergy groups classify it as such since it's a food that more people are becoming allergic to. Sadly, allergies are becoming more and more prevalent these days.

More Great DIY Pantry Staples

• Homemade Rice Milk
• Easiest Coconut Milk
• Homemade Powdered Sugar or Powdered Sugar Substitute
• Easiest Almond Milk
• Homemade Sunflower Seed Butter
• Powdered Egg Replacer – works amazingly well in most recipes that call for eggs.