Making plant-based milk has been one of my first priority when I started to be more conscious of what I was eating. Most plant-based milk are unfortunately not as good as we can think, I didn’t say all of them but a big part are full of preservative, additive and sometimes sugar. All of these things that we don’t really want to see in our body.
Most of the nut milk are made just with 2% of nut and loaded with different components that don’t really need to be there. I understand trying to make a longer shelve life to any non-dairy milk is crucial if we want to commercial it but it is not what I want for my body.
Especially since I discover how easy and satisfying was to make plant-based milk. The combinations are endless. You can’t get wrong with it. It will take 10 minutes to make a good and rich nut milk and let you free to control the quality and the taste of it.
Even though making nut milk is easy, there is few crucial steps to respect in order to have a good milk.
Soaking process is the most important of it. Without this step, you can’t make good nut milk. Most nuts contain enzyme inhibitors that make really hard to digest them. Therefore, by soaking them, we allow liberating this enzyme and the nuts becoming easier to digest, much more nutritive and softer in order to extract more milk.
Blending with filter water is essential. You don’t want to break all the benefit of this amazing nut milk by adding tap water. Filter water is the key to a good taste.
The last step we can’t really commit is the straining part. Once the nuts and water have been blended you will need to strain the mixture into a nut milk bag.
However not every nut need to be strain some of them dissolved themselves enough without leaving any piece but for almond or hazelnuts, for instance, this part is crucial otherwise you need with a mixture full of nuts powder.
But don’t throw away the nut pulp, you can dehydrate it and blend it into a flour to using in any of your baking time.
INGREDIENT
- 1 cup* of nuts
- 2 cup of filter
- Pinch of salt
METHOD
- Soaking time
Almond: 8-12 hours
Brazil nuts: 8 hours
Cashew: 6 hours
Hazelnuts: 8 hours
Macadamia: 12 hours
Pecans: 6 hours
Pistachio: 6 hours
Walnuts: 7 hours
Seed: 8 hours
Drain nuts, Rinse them and place into a high-speed blender with filter water and a pinch of salt.
Strain with a nut bag, press enough to get all the milk until the pulp remain is dry
Store it in fridge it will last 4 days
note: I usually don't use a cup as a metric but in this case, it is about ratio so any kind of cup is good until you used the same for the nuts and water.
note 2: you can add 1 or 2 dates to make your milk a little bit sweeter or even a pinch of vanilla extract is always welcome.