YAYYYY, you’re here!! 🙂
It’s me, Anna, here to ramble on about things and then eventually give you some loose guidelines on how to make almond milk [business tip: underpromise, overdeliver]! If you just came for the recipe, feel free to jump to the bottom of this post. Otherwise, please stay and enjoy a little background on the blonde party & me.
If you don’t know me personally, you may not know that I currently have about a million food intolerances. Yep. It is a major bummer. BUT, it’s not all bad.
One thing that has come out of learning how sensitive I am to seemingly innocuous things, is a major love for cooking. I mean, I am PASSIONATE about it. If you’ve been following us for awhile, you may have noticed how I fangirl over my own creations in the kitchen. I can’t help it. I am constantly in awe of how easy it is to recreate some of my favorite foods to be gluten free, dairy free, corn free, egg free, etc. And what do I do when I find something I am passionate about? I don’t stop talking about it [hello, the blonde party].
I know, I know, this is a very loooong intro for a post about how to make almond milk [I told you you could skip to the recipe!]. But, this really sheds a little light on what we’re all about. Most of the time we are not going to be experts in the things we talk about. We are experimenters. Early adopters. Creators. Information seekers. We want to be ahead of the curve, to find the next big things, test them out and then share our thoughts. Creating, experimenting and sharing brings us all a lot of joy and and that’s what we hope to continue to bring to you. “Hey, did you know it’s easy to do x, y, z?” We’ve tried it, we’re not experts, but we’re capable and you are too!
So, I didn’t make almond milk because it was cheaper, healthier, or easier; I made it because I wanted to try something new. To create something. Even something as simple as blended nut water. [Mmm… Nut water?]
One last thing – I have a lot of notes included with the below “recipe.” I’m sorry if that annoys you, but as a novice nut milk maker, I haven’t perfected my technique and I really want to leave it a little open-ended, so you can customize to your liking.
Without further ado, here’s our favorite method thus far (updated 2/17):
Ingredients/Supplies:
- 1 cup of raw almonds
- Water
- Pinch of pink Himalayan salt
- Nut milk bag, or cheesecloth
- Optional: sweetener (stevia, dates, sugar, honey, syrup, etc.), extracts (almond, vanilla) or other flavorings (cinnamon)
Instructions:
- Soak 1 cup of raw almonds in hot water for about an hour (or until skins are loose). We changed the water 2-3 times.
- Remove almond skins. This seems rather tedious, but is actually kind of fun (we accidentally shot a few across the room). You can remove them one by one (resulting in a potential scramble to retrieve them from the other room before the dog eats them) or you can rub a bunch of them together to remove many at a time. You could probably also shake them in a container like you can to peel garlic. Wow, lots of notes on this part, like I said, it’s kind of fun. Moving on…
- Place almonds in fresh water (temperature doesn’t matter) and set aside to soak overnight (we’ve found the soak time to be extremely flexible, so just do what works for you).
- Rinse almonds and place into Vitamix (or similar blender/food processor) with 4 cups of fresh, cold water.
- Add salt and optional sweeteners/flavorings. We’ve tried vanilla extract, almond extract, stevia, and dates, but this is completely up to you! One warning: be careful not to add too much extract (1/2 teaspoon is probably enough). You can also just add these things in at the end, if you’d rather taste it first.
- Blend for 2 minutes (or until smooth)
- Place a nut milk bag over a large bowl or pitcher and pour the blended mixture into the bag. Then, squeeze the bag until no liquid remains. It’s kind of like milking a cow. Again, kind of fun.
- Discard the contents of the nut milk bag & transfer nut milk into fridge!
cheers, the blonde party