How to make almond milk and use its leftovers for almond flour

(Lost most of my pictures when I switched from WP to blogger. Slowly working on putting them back, but it's a massive undertaking so please forgive the broken image links!)



Want to feel really self-sufficient?  Take some almonds and turn them into almond milk and almond flour.  And the biggest secret of all?  It's EASY.  Girl scout's honor.

Do you or have you ever bought the cartons of coconut milk/almond milk/soy milk?  If so, you're not alone.  I did, and I thought nothing of it.  In fact, since it was a purchase I usually made from the organic section, I assumed it was totally fine.  But it is, after all, a processed food.  It never occurred to me to actually read the label.  I'm guilty of this all the time.  Oh, I'm buying this from Whole Foods/Trader Joes/Earth Fare?  It simply must be good for me then!

I'm not going to go through each ingredient one-by-one but there are a lot of questionable things here.  I've already linked to this great article about natural and artificial flavors, and it is something I have cut out of our diets almost 100% when we eat at home.  Here's some food for thought about carrageenan, though I'm not sure exactly how I feel about this one just yet.  If you want to look up the rest of the ingredients, you'll see that most are not something you want to be consuming in any significant quantity.  Keep in mind that these are the ingredients of the unsweetened almond milk.  If you drink sweetened or vanilla, you can add sugar along with other unhealthy ingredients to this list.

This is what I've been giving my son for awhile (who may or may not have a dairy intolerance...the jury is still out), and now I wish I'd done my research earlier and discovered how easy it is to make my own!

Soy milk and coconut milk, in the carton, are very similar with their own set of unhealthy ingredients, and soy itself poses lots of health risks so we shoot for consuming very small amounts of soy.

As far as almond milk in general (not talking about the processed form), it's a healthy alternative to cow's milk if you are lactose/dairy intolerant, vegan or just don't particularly care for cow's milk.  It's got more vitamins and minerals than soy or rice milk (rice milk is pretty nutritionally void in general).  Almond milk contains omega-3 fatty acids, which are the good ones and the ones missing from conventional beef sold in the grocery store, while its grassfed counterpart has lots of the good, healthy fat!  Our bodies need a ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fats that most of us don't get with our modern processed diets (instead we're heavy on the omega-6s and deficient in omega-3s), and I theorize it's predominantly because of the industrialization of our food system and feeding all our livestock the wrong things.  An 8 ounce glass of almond milk contains about a gram of protein and a gram of dietary fiber and is low in calories.  Almonds are great sources of vitamins, too.  They contain vitamin E, manganese, selenium, magnesium, potassium, zinc, iron, fiber, phosphorous and calcium.

Alright, I suppose we can get to the actual recipe now, eh?

You'll need 3 cups of almonds.  I went with blanched almonds because the skin is already removed.  If you want to turn it into flour and you use raw almonds, keep in mind that you'll have to peel all the skins off before you run your milk through the blender.  Also, if you want to do raw almonds, I'm guessing it's either because it's what you have on hand or you care about raw and you'd rather not cook it.  If the latter is true, you can disregard the boiling method I'm about to talk about and just soak the raw almonds overnight in water (or for 6-8 hours) instead.  Just remember to peel off the skin if you want to turn it into flour.



Next, put your almonds into a large bowl and pour 6 cups of boiling water over the almonds.



Let this soak for an hour.  Then pour the water and soaked almonds into a blender (I do this in two batches) and blend on high for a bit.  When you're done, it should look like this:



Next, drape some cheesecloth (or a nut bag if you have one!) over a bowl.  Sometimes I just use a regular old dish towel.  It serves its purpose but not as effectively.  It'll work in a pinch.



Then pour your nut pulp/milk mixture over the cheesecloth.



Then lift this up and squeeze all the milk out while leaving the pulp behind.



What you're left with will look like this:



And this (set aside for now):



You can go ahead and bottle up your milk.  It's all done!  Keep in mind that this will naturally separate, so shake before serving.





Now take your remaining almond pulp and spread it out on parchment paper over a large baking sheet.



Stick it in the oven as low as you can go (for me that's 200) for 1 to 1.5 hours, or until it feels completely dry.



When it's dry, run it through a clean coffee grinder and voila, almond flour!  You can bake with this in lots of recipes!  I'll post my favorites sometime this week.