Making your own nut milk is something that seems complicated until you actually do it. And then once you taste fresh almond milk you wonder why you’d ever want to buy it from a carton.
A bonus for those prone to kitchen disasters is you can tweak it a million ways and still be hard pressed to ruin it.
There are two catches: 1.) You need a good, powerful blender and 2.) You’ll need a nut milk bag, which is not always easy to find in every grocery store. (You can use several layers of cheesecloth – and I mean several – if you can’t find a bag.)
Here’s what you do:
A. Soak one cup of nuts overnight. I like to use a combo of cashews and almonds. Just because.
B. Drain and rinse well, then put nuts in blender along with 3-4 cups of filtered water, depending on your desired thickness. Blend on high until there are no large specks left.
C. Situate the nut milk bag inside a medium/large bowl. Pour a portion of the blender mixture into the bag (I’ve found it easiest to do this in stages, as opposed to dumping in the whole shebang at once.)
D. Pick up the bag with the mixture inside it and lightly squeeze the liquid through it into a separate bowl. I stress the word lightly. That is unless you feel like cleaning almond milk from your cabinets for days.
E. You’ll be left with a bunch of debris in the bag after that first squeeze. Leave it there and repeat the “pour/squeeze into a separate bowl” sequence until the blender is empty. Put the bag aside for now.
F. Rinse out the blender immediately, don’t wait. That stuff is a biotch to clean if it hardens. Plus, you don’t want leftover blender grit when you move on to this next step…
G. Pour the newly strained liquid back into the blender. Although it’s not necessary, this is your chance to flavor or sweeten. Some options include vanilla extract, vanilla bean, a soaked date, honey, maple syrup, or agave nectar. Blend just until mixed.
H. Pour mixture into a mason jar to keep for up to a week.
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Coupla things to note:
- You can dry the leftover almond meal in the bag and use in other recipes. Some day I hope to be the type of person who does that, but for now I just admire people who do that.
- The nut milk bag can be rinsed thoroughly and reused, so it’s a worthwhile purchase.
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If you think this is complicated, you should try milking a cow!
