Cashew Flour

Technically, cashew flour can be purchased at some grocery stores or online. To me, it is not worth the price and I prefer to make my own out of raw cashews. Cashews are a nut with a similar fat/protein profile as almonds, though they do vary a bit in nutrients. (Actually, I believe they are technically considered a “seed” rather than “nut,” but they are found at the store in the nut section and generally categorized with nuts.)

Cashew flour can be used interchangeably with almond flour in recipes. It is a great go-to for those who can’t have almonds and/or want a low-carb or gluten-free flour option.

Making cashew flour at home isn’t the easiest. Being a nut, cashews have oils in them. If ground too fast or too long the oils will be released and you’ll have a paste rather than a flour. This is then called “cashew butter” (like peanut butter or almond butter) and won’t bake the same as cashew flour, even though both are made exclusively of cashews.

How to Make Cashew Flour

I used a Vitamix, as it is my only kitchen appliance which can grind nuts/grains. The key if using a blender is to do small batches – no more than 2 cups. I first made cashew flour for pancakes. I needed 1 1/2 cups of flour so ground up 1 3/4 cups of raw cashews and it came out to be the perfect amount. If you have a food processor I’m guessing that would work a little better, but the blender did the trick too.

Make sure you keep the speed fairly low. Too fast and you’ll have cashew butter on the bottom and raw cashew chunks on the top. Also, stop blending if you see the flour start clumping together.

Technically, you can strain it through a mesh sieve to get the small nut pieces out. Simply re-process these pieces to get them finer. This could be a good idea if you are baking and want a fine/smooth texture. For pancakes, though, I leave the chunks in. Yes, we could tell there were little pieces of nuts in our pancakes, but they still cooked up great and otherwise were fantastic. I would probably skip the straining for most baking applications, as only about half of my “flour” fit through the sieve, the other half I’d have to re-grind.