I keep reading about how awesome Almond Milk is with Huel so I thought I’d give it a go. Now, I’m not cheap, but I found myself at Sainsburys looking at a litre bottle of Alpro and thinking to myself “you what, £1.80!? Sod that, how hard can it be to milk an almond!?” Must be the Northener in me, hast thou almond udders?
Turns out it’s pretty easy, way easier than the time I tried to milk a cow but that’s a whole other story. Anyway, I digress. I bought 500g of organic almonds for a couple of quid and got nearly 2L of unsweetened almond milk - in your face Mr Alpro!
The process can be surmised as follows: Put almonds in water, wait for a bit. Rinse, blend, strain into bottle, done.
Or in more detail…
- Soak almonds for 12 to 24 hours in water with ½ tsp sea salt. This does something funky with enzymes and acid and health bloggers all go mad about how we’re always supposed to soak nuts before eating them (who knew?).
- A day later your almonds will have sprouted a bit in the now pretty rank water. Give them a good rinse.
- 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).
- Strain mixture into a large bowl through a cheese cloth**
- (optional) Re-blend with some vanilla, stevia, or another sweetener.
*Blending took around 45 seconds for me but my blender is a 2000w commercial behemoth, your timings may vary.
**Straining was an absolute b#stard to do with a cheesecloth, I’ll be buying a nut bag for future efforts (yes, they’re an actual thing).
Aside from step 1 it took around ten minutes or doing stuff to get about 2litres of almond milk and without all the extra preservatives that are in shop bought stuff. Oh and the straining leaves you with a load of almond meal that you can dry out in the oven to make almond flour, or stick in the fridge for adding to Huel/smoothies for 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.
The same process works for all nuts, though I’ve read you shouldn’t drink too much cashew milk for some reason. Shame because that’s the one nut milk you won’t have to mess about straining (did I mention that straining it was an absolute b#stard to do?).
Anyway, DIY nut milk, thought I’d share 