DIY Almond Milk

More often than not you’ll use water with Meal Replacement powders and Complete Foods. It mixes quickly and it’s free, but if you’re looking to add some more flavour, or creaminess, then milk is where it’s at.

Quite a few Complete Foods suggest whole milk, but for my part I really like using nut milk as it adds a really enjoyable new dimension to the experience and keeps things vegan (if that’s important to you).

You could buy it from a shop, almond, Oat and other plant based milks are available seemingly everywhere these days but a carton of it can easily set you back a few pounds/dollars and compared to water, that adds up.

But…. you can make your own, and it’s pretty easy.

The method below makes 2 litres of unsweetened nut milk using 500g of organic almonds and is surprisingly little effort. In fact, the process can be summed up as follows:

Put almonds in water, wait for a bit. Rinse, blend, strain into bottle, done.

Or in more detail…

1. Soak almonds for 12 to 24 hours in water with tsp sea salt. This activates some enzymes and pulls acids out of the nuts and, oddly enough, health bloggers all seem to go mad about how we’re supposed to soak all nuts before eating them anyway (who knew?).
2. A day later your almonds will have sprouted a bit in the now pretty rank water. Give them a good rinse.
3. Put the almonds in a blender with 2 cups water per 1 cup almonds*. Then blend until it looks nice and creamy (Beware: the mixture will expand a lot during this stage, don’t go more than 2/3 full in your blender).
4. Strain mixture into a large bowl through a nutbag**
5. (optional) Re-blend with some vanilla, stevia, or another sweetener.

*Blending took around 45 seconds for me but my blender is a 2000w behemoth, your timings may vary.

**Nut bags are porous and make very quick work of straining. You can use a cheesecloth, but it’s much harder to do without making a mess.

Aside from step 1 it took around ten minutes or doing stuff to get about two litres of almond milk and without all the extra preservatives that are in shop bought stuff plus you get a load of almond meal as a side product that you can dry out in the oven to make almond flour, or stick in the fridge for adding to ‘lents for some extra nutrition. Win!

Obviously different nuts have different nutritional values so they can throw your calorie count and macro’s unless you do the sums. And whilst the same process works for all nuts I’ve read that you shouldn’t drink too much cashew milk, so it’s worth doing some extra reading around this.