Recently I switched from peanut or sunflower seed butter to pumpkin seed butter, for various reasons. Unfortunately I have yet to find an organic pumpkin seed butter that doesnât end up fairly runny after you mix it together (for which I usually use a knife rather than fork or spoon, FWIW).
I tried several different solutions, my own ideas, as well as some from research of course. Pouring off some of the oil is an option, but seems wasteful and the end result can be a bit dry if youâre not careful. Mixing in water affects the texture in a very negative way. Tapioca flour and arrowroot powder both failed to do much in terms of thickening, at least in reasonable quantities. I didnât try xanthan or guar gum as I didnât have any on hand, and I felt like agar would give it the wrong texture (though may still be worth a try).
The problem with many - if not all - of these solutions is they try to âsoak upâ the oil with an absorbent or binding substance. This is bound to affect the texture. What if we went counter-intuitive and added more oil?.. Specifically, unrefined coconut oil, which is a solid at average room temperature (in the 70s).
Well, it turns out that adding about 1tbsp of unrefined coconut oil to 16oz of pumpkin seed butter and keeping the resulting product in the fridge works extremely well! Depending on how much you add and how runny it was to begin with, it can actually make things a bit too firm, so youâll want to start small, warm up the coconut oil to a liquid, then mix and refrigerate. Unfortunately it would take too much coconut oil to be firm at room temperature (if it ever would be), so this wonât work for those of you who hate refrigerated nut/seed butters. But given that many of the other solutions out there just donât work, itâs worth a try!