Hemp butter ‒ Hamppuvoi

Nowadays it is possible to find domestic hemp seeds from a grocery store. The world's probably most multifunctional and one of Finland's oldest cultivated plants is slowly starting to gain back the wide-used position it had a hundred years ago. Which is great, since it has the potential to solve all mankind's energy and hunger problems plus be used to make better paper, fabric and medicine. Maybe the drug police isn't allowed do anything they come up with after all.

Happy for this discovery I thought I'd try out some of the different dishes you can prepare of hamppu or liina. There are some basic recipes in the pages of the local vegan organisation. Following their instructions I managed to make hemp butter or hempini (named after tahini, a sesame seed paste). Here's what I did:

2 dl hemp seeds
3/4 dl rape oil
4 garlic cloves
1,5 tbsp basil
1/2 tsp salt
1 dl water (more or less, depending on the structure you want)

Roast the seeds on a dry frying pan enough for them to start smell and get some colour. Blend them smooth with the rest of the ingridients. Be sure not to leave those crunchy seed bits there.

The basil part made me suspicious since so far I've only found it useful with tomato soup, (And I'm not saying an Italian cook couldn't make excellent things with it.) but for once I did what I was told. And they were right, it doesn't taste too much, perhaps cause I also used a lot of garlic. (Still, next time I think I'll try a bit more Finnish type of spices.) Mine is rather strong and meant to be used for cooking in the same way as for example Italian pesto sauce is. This is mostly cause I roasted the seeds rather well. If you want to use this on the bread, roast them only lightly and use spices in a more conservative manner.

Nutritional values / 420 g (This varies quite a bit from one hemp breed to another. The one I used is particulary oily and therefore relatively lower than most in protein.)
energy 1814 kcal
fat 150 g
protein 58 g
carbohydrates 80 g
fiber 59 g