The Best Blenders for Nut Butter

Why nut butter is a different job from everything else

Every other thing you put in a blender has liquid in it. A smoothie has juice or milk, soup has stock, a frozen drink has melt. Liquid is what makes a blender work: it carries solids down into the blade, and the vortex that forms above the blade keeps feeding the cutting edge. Nut butter has no liquid at all. You put in nuts and you get back the oil the nuts themselves release, and until that release happens there is nothing to carry anything anywhere.

What happens instead is cavitation. The paste thickens, packs against the container wall, and leaves a pocket of air sitting around the spinning blade. The motor sounds like it is working hard, the machine gets hot, and nothing in the middle of the jar moves. That is the failure mode, and it is not a power problem. A 1,400-peak-watt Ninja pitcher cavitates on almond butter in the same way a 300-watt machine does, because the blade is not in contact with anything either way.

There are only two honest fixes. Either you stop the machine every 20 seconds, take the lid off and push the mixture back down with a spatula, or the machine ships with a tool that lets you do that while it runs. That tool is a tamper, and whether a blender has one is the single most useful thing to know before you buy one for this job.

The five criteria we ranked on

We have not made nut butter in a lab and we are not going to pretend we have. What follows is a spec-and-published-claim read of the machines we track, ranked on the five things that actually decide this job. Our method is on how we review.

• Does a tamper come in the box? Not sold separately, not an accessory you could add later. In the box, named in the listing.
• Is the container the right size for the batch? This is the criterion most buyers get backwards. For nut butter, bigger is worse.
• What does the maker publish about the motor? Horsepower, watts, or nothing at all. Some of these figures are not comparable with each other, and we say which.
• What is cleanup like? Nut butter is the stickiest thing a home kitchen puts in a jar. A self-cleaning routine is worth more here than on any other recipe.
• How long is the machine covered? Nut butter is the hardest sustained load most home blenders will ever see. The warranty is the only published signal of whether the maker expects the machine to survive it.

Criterion one: the tamper is the whole page

A tamper is a plastic plunger that passes through a hole in the lid and stops short of the blade. The lid plug is shaped so that the tamper cannot physically reach the blade even at full extension, which is why you are allowed to use it with the motor running. You press the paste off the container wall and back into the blade path, the air pocket collapses, and the blend continues.

Of the blenders in our catalog, the ones whose listings name a tamper in the box are all Vitamix: the Ascent X3 (an S2 low-profile tamper plus a tamper holder), the Propel Series 510, the 5200, and the older A2300. No Ninja pitcher we track ships one. No NutriBullet ships one, and the NutriBullet format could not use one: you screw a blade onto an inverted cup, so there is no lid to pass a plunger through. No immersion blender ships one either, for the obvious reason that you are already holding the motor and can move the blade yourself.

That is why the top three slots on this page are Vitamix machines, and we are not going to dress it up as a brand preference. It is a feature question with a short answer. If a different maker shipped a tamper with a big pitcher at a quarter of the price, it would be at the top of this list instead.

Criterion two: for nut butter, the smaller container wins

Every other page on this site tells you a bigger jar is more useful. This one does not. Blades sit at the bottom of a container and a blend only works when there is enough volume to reach them. For a smoothie you make up the difference with liquid. For nut butter the only thing in the jar is nuts, so the floor on batch size is set by the container: a 64-ounce jar wants something like four cups of nuts in it before the blade has anything to bite on, and four cups of nuts makes a great deal of nut butter.

The 48-ounce containers on the Ascent X3 and the Propel 510 are the reason both rank above the 5200 here. Two to three cups of nuts is a normal jar of peanut butter, it fills the smaller container properly, and it is a quantity a household will get through before the oil separates. The 5200 and its 64-ounce classic container is the right machine if you make nut butter in quantity, portion it into jars and freeze some. It is the wrong one if you want a cup of cashew butter on a Sunday.

Container shape matters too, and it is the one place the older 5200 has an edge. Its classic 64-ounce container is tall and comparatively narrow at the base, so what volume you do put in sits deeper over the blade. The low-profile 48-ounce containers are shorter and wider; they clear a standard cabinet at around 17 to 17.5 inches tall where the 5200 stands 20.5 inches, but they spread a small batch thinner. The full range and the clearance figures are in Vitamix models compared.

Criterion three: the motor numbers here are not comparable

Vitamix publishes horsepower and does not publish watts. Ninja publishes peak watts, a momentary figure measured at startup rather than a continuous rating. NutriBullet publishes a plain watt figure. Those three numbers describe different things and cannot be lined up against each other, which is the same finding our how many watts do you need in a blender guide reaches from the other direction.

Among the machines that publish horsepower the ladder is short and real: the Ascent X3 states 2.2 HP, the highest figure Vitamix publishes on anything we track; the 5200 and the Propel 510 state 2 HP; and two machines in the range, the A2300 and the Ascent X5, publish no motor rating at all. We report the missing ones as missing rather than filling them in.

For nut butter, though, the more useful number is not the rating but the duty. This is a multi-minute continuous run under thickening load, longer than almost anything else you will ask a blender to do, and it is the reason the warranty criterion below is not a throwaway.

Criterion four: heat, and the stickiest cleanup in the kitchen

Friction heat is not purely a problem here. Warm nuts release oil faster, which is why most nut butter recipes tell you to roast the nuts first and start blending while they are still warm: it shortens the run, which is better for the motor as well as for you. What you do not want is the paste getting hot enough to scorch, which is a real risk once it is past the crumbly stage and being worked by a blade in a sealed jar.

Then there is cleanup, and nut butter is genuinely the worst case. It is sticky, it is fatty, and it dries onto plastic. Every Vitamix here publishes the same routine: warm water, a drop of dish soap, run the machine, 30 to 60 seconds, no disassembly. On the Ascent X3 that is an actual program rather than something you time yourself. Against disassembling a stacked-blade pitcher and washing a blade tower by hand, that is a meaningful difference on a recipe this greasy. Our guide to cleaning a blender has the routine for the machines that do not self-clean.

Criterion five: the published cover

Across the five picks the published terms are: Ascent X3, 10 years; 5200, 7 years; Propel 510, 5 years, which Vitamix describes as covering parts, labor and return shipping both ways; Cuisinart DFP-14BCNY, a limited 3-year on the unit with a full 5-year on the motor; and Ninja BN801, 1 year limited.

A warranty is a financial commitment rather than a prediction, but on a recipe that runs the motor under sustained load it is the most relevant published figure there is. Note too that Cuisinart is the only brand here warranting the motor on its own, and that the Ninja term is the shortest on the page by a factor of five. The same inverted ladder turns up in every category we cover, and we wrote it up in how long do blenders last.

Machines we left off, and why

• NutriBullet Pro.This is the machine people ask about most for nut butter and the honest answer is that it is not built for it. There is no tamper and the format cannot take one, the 32-ounce cup seals around an inverted blade so you can neither see nor reach the mixture, and nut butter is exactly the kind of thick, no-liquid load that makes a single-serve machine run hot. NutriBullet's own listing describes nuts and seeds as ingredients it blends into drinks, not as nut butter it makes. It is an excellent smoothie cup and it is in our best personal blenders roundup for that.
• Ninja Professional Plus BN701 and the BL610 pitcher. Both are strong value blenders and both are in best blenders for crushing ice, which is the job they are genuinely built for. Neither ships a tamper, and both pitchers are marked 64 ounces maximum liquid on a 72-ounce jar, a sign of how much headroom these vessels are designed to need. On nut butter you would be stopping and scraping continuously.
• Vitamix A2300 and Ascent X5.Both ship a tamper and both would work. The A2300 uses the larger 64-ounce low-profile container, so it has the 5200's batch-size floor without the 5200's deeper jar; the X5 is the most expensive machine we track and its extra programs are not nut butter programs. Neither publishes a motor rating. Both are laid out in full on Vitamix models compared.
• Immersion blenders. A stick blender in a bowl of nuts is a bad idea: no vessel wall is doing any work, the guard clogs, and you are holding the motor over a load it was not designed for. Immersion blenders are the right answer for hot soup and small wet jobs, which is what immersion blender vs. blender covers.

The cheaper answer, said plainly

If nut butter is the main reason you are shopping, a food processor is the less expensive way to get there, and we would rather tell you that than sell you a premium blender. A processor works the problem from a different angle: the bowl is wide and flat and the blade sweeps the floor of it, so the paste has nowhere to climb to. You will still scrape the sides a few times, but there is no air pocket to collapse because there is no tall jar for one to form in.

The Cuisinart DFP-14BCNY is our pick for that: a 720-watt motor under a 14-cup bowl, a limited 3-year warranty on the unit with a full 5-year on the motor, and it does every other thing a food processor does the rest of the week. The full DFP-14 review has the detail, and blender vs. food processor is the wider version of this argument. A processor also does a job no blender can touch, which is turning a bag of potatoes into even slices in under a minute — best food processors for slicing vegetables covers that side of the same machine. The Ninja Professional Plus Kitchen System is the same idea bundled with a blender: its 8-cup Precision Processor Bowl is the vessel to use for this, not the 72-ounce pitcher it also comes with.

And if you make nut butter twice a year, buy the jar. A blender earns its place on this recipe through repetition, through control over what goes into it, or through a dietary reason to avoid palm oil and added sugar. None of those apply to an occasional cook, and are blenders worth it works through that calculation honestly.

Getting it right on whichever machine you buy

Four things make the difference between a ten-minute grind and a three-minute one, and none of them cost anything.

• Roast the nuts and start warm. Warm nuts give up their oil far sooner. This is the biggest single lever on run time, and a shorter run is easier on the motor.
• Do not add liquid. Water seizes nut butter into a stiff paste. If you want it looser, add a neutral oil, and add it at the end rather than the start.
• Use the tamper constantly, not occasionally. On a Vitamix the technique is continuous pressure toward the corners of the container at a moderate speed, not short jabs at full speed.
• Expect three stages. Crumbs, then a thick ball that climbs the wall, then a sudden break into liquid butter. Almost everyone gives up during the ball stage. That stage is the machine working, not failing.

If you are still deciding between brands or formats rather than models, Vitamix vs. Ninja settles the two names that dominate this category, our blender buying guide covers the whole decision from scratch, and what size blender do I need applies the container question to every other recipe you will make.