Keto Homemade Hazelnut Butter Recipe

This easy and healthy keto homemade hazelnut butter tastes great on fruit, toast or even in your smoothies. It’s a delicious low carb nut butter and spread that you can make in minutes with just a few ingredients. It’s also fun to add chocolate, extracts, sweeteners etc to change the flavor too! 

You might also like this low carb chocolate hazelnut butter too!

I’ve always love peanut butter and boy was I surprised to find out that there are all kinds of nut butters available. Once on vacation I found a maple almond butter and from there I was hooked.

This homemade hazelnut butter is one of my first experiments and it was so easy I know I will make more. If you love the flavor of hazelnut you have to try this simple nut butter.

It’s naturally low carb so it’s great for those on a keto diet.  And can be flavored in many different ways!

Are nuts good for a low carb diet?

Many people snack on nuts when on a low carb diet. It’s because they are full of healthy fats and protein while being low in carbs. They are also very convenient to eat and very filling as a keto snack.

However some type of nuts are lower in carbs than others. And while they are low in carbs they are high in calories so you don’t want to over do it. Here are the carb counts for a few of my favorite nuts. 

• pecans –  1 oz has 1g net carbs – great substitute for pretzels
• almonds – 1 oz has 3g net carbs – flour is very good for baking
• walnuts –  1 oz has 2g net carbs – good for cookies or cookie dough
• macadamia nuts –  1 oz has 2g net carbs – tasty to eat as is
• cashews – 1 oz has 7.7g net carbs – great in stir fries 
• Brazil nuts – 1 oz has 1g net carbs –  really good source of selenium
• hazelnuts –  1 oz has 2g net carbs – distinct flavor (Nutella anyone?)

The 2 simple ingredients I used in this nut butter.

To make homemade nut butters all you really need are nuts. However there are other ingredients you can add to make it more tasty. For this recipe I used roasted hazelnuts and Swerve sweetener to keep it low carb. 

If you want to add additional flavor, without carb try using extracts and flavorings. For example maple extract or a caramel extract would be delicious in any nut butter. You can also try sugar free sweeteners like Lakanto maple syrup or Swerve brown sugar. 

If you don’t care about carbs, you can play around with sweeteners like maple syrup, honey or coconut sugar. 

Adding cocoa powder will give it that Nutella chocolate flavor but you would definitely need to add sweetness.

Some people like to add coconut oil or avocado oil to get a smooth butter but I didn’t feel like it needed it.

How to take the skins off hazelnuts.

I’m updating this recipe as of October 2019. Today I used roasted hazelnuts I got from Costco. This was so much easier to make the nut butter but if you can’t find them, you can roast your own. 

Below you an see what the hazelnuts (or sometimes called filberts) with the skin on. You want to roast these and take of as much of the skins as you can because they can leave a bitter aftertaste.

 

1. Place the raw hazelnuts on a cookie sheet in a single layer and bake in 375°F oven for 10-15 minutes.
2. Take them out of the oven place in a tea towel. Wrap them up and let them sit in there for 10 minutes.
3. Then keeping them in the tea towel, start to rub them together to get the skins off. You can see below that you won’t get them all and that is ok. 

You can also blanch hazelnuts to take off the skin, but I have never tried this.

How to make keto homemade hazelnut butter.

To make any kind of nut butter you can either use a high-speed blender or food processor. 

Step 1: Ok now that you have your roasted hazelnuts add them to your food processor bowl like below.

Remember for this updated batch I used the roasted hazelnuts from Costco. You can also do this with a high speed blender like a Vitamix, but it’s harder to get all the nut butter out in my opinion. 

Step 2: Turn the processor on and let it run for about 5 minutes.

Pictured below is what it looks like after 2 minutes. You can see it has a thick and gritty consistency. You might want to scrape the sides down every once in a while and then continue to process.

This is what it looks like after 4 minutes. It took a little longer when I used my own roasted nuts but all in all it should take no more than 6 minutes. I guess it might depend on how many nuts you use too. 

But you want that smooth consistency and texture like that pictured below.

Step 3: At this point you would want to add in your sweetener and or extracts. Let it mix for another 30 seconds to make sure it’s well combined. You might also want to add a pinch of salt depending on the salt content of the nuts you used.

Step 4: Store in an airtight container or glass jars. You can keep this in the refrigerator for a couple weeks.

Note that this keto hazelnut butter will thicken when chilled and will get thinner when it comes to room temperature. (Please scroll down to view the printable recipe card.)

And that is all there is to making homemade hazelnut butter. Isn’t it so simple? I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

The nutritional information for 1 tablespoon is 80 cals / 8g fat / 2.2g carbs / 1.3g fiber / 1.8g protein = 0.9g net carbs

You might also like this one of these keto nut butter and seed recipes: maple bacon almond butter, keto chocolate Hazelnut butter recipe (keto Nutella) and this sunflower seed butter.