Dude, seriously…? Another post about milk alternatives?
I finally gave almond milk a try and it wasn’t as annoying or difficult as I thought it would be!
To be perfectly honest, when I first made oat milk I strained it using a nutbag (heh) and it made me so angry I wanted to murder cute things with my bare hands. Then I remembered that this was so not Raven and moved on to using strainers. Pain in my padded ass.
I must have been overtired or just hungry because had I been thinking straight, I would have realized that all that starch was gunna screw me and make straining through a nutbag damn near impossible. Like pushing peanut butter through a brick wall. I washed and dried the bag, put it away and ignored/cursed its existence.
In the interest of not buying milk anymore since my body decided we were going vegan through epic bloat, I gave almond milk a try.
Do this now!
Soak 1 cup of almonds overnight
Rinse well
Add the almonds and a cup of filtered water into your pulverizing machine. Blitz to hell. It’ll be way thick at this point – bordering on nut butter.
Ew. That term never gets not gross.
Add another cup, continue to blitz through a few circles of aforementioned eternal damnation. At this point, the almonds should come to a smoother consistency. Do this with another 2 cups, one at a time. Why one at a time? Cuz I said so.
Also, the more water in there, the less you’ll be able to break down the almonds if you haven’t done it enough in the first 2 cups – they’ll just be swimming around, avoiding certain doom. Sounds like a lot of work but really takes about 2 minutes. If you can spare a minute for Jesus, you can give me two for almonds.
Now we strain!
Some sites tell you to strain a bit at a time, but fuck that, we don’t have that kind of time. Depositions, quantum physics; we’ve got shit to do.
Pour about half of the mixture in and milk the nutbag like the cow you’re glad it ain’t. Do the same with the rest of the mixture. Not sure why I had to add that. What else were you doing with the rest…?
Done-zo. Put that magic in a container of sorts and you should be good to go for about a week. I’m not a scientist, psychic or doctor, so smell it before each use to ensure it’s still good. I imagine it would smell very obviously different or bad if it were. That or you’d get the shits. Either way: warning signs.
I did the math (and sometimes it comes out right, too!) and for a 3 pound bag yielding 9 cups of almonds at $17.99 from Costco, with each cup of almonds yielding 4 cups of milk, it comes out to $.50 cents a cup.
If you were to somehow buy a 32oz container of almond milk at $2.00 (which is unheard of levels of cheap), it would come out to the same price except that our homemade stuff has almonds + water. Nothing else. Their stuff has added sugar, toenail clippings and cancer-causing ingredients. No one wants your toe-jam, Silk.
Also the percentage of actual almonds you get when you’ve got store-bought shenanigans is so minuscule, you may as well be mixing Elmer’s Glue and water.
I ended up folding the almond pulp into the quickest vegan pumpkin pie I’ve ever made – the grounds + 1 can of pumpkin puree, 2 teaspoons pumpkin spice (home mixed) and 1 cup of maple syrup. Blitz it all together, stick in pie crust, in the oven at 400 for 15 minutes and then lower to 350 for 30 minutes. In the fridge a few hours and inhale.
I also attempted to make feta cheese with my first batch. That’s all I have to say about that. I’ll let you know when a batch comes close to cheese and then we’ll party.
UPDATE: The pie sucked. I’ll work on making it suck less in the future… maybe. Hold tight, I’ll just find a different use for the almond pulp.
half-priced hippie 