Thursday, March 17, 2011

Almond milk

I splurged and bought myself a soy milk maker a little while ago, and let me tell you, it's been getting a workout! And it's certainly very worth it. Through trial an error I've come up with a soy milk recipe we both like, and I can make it for 50c for 1.5L. Awesome. (The recipe is 100g whole organic soy beans, soaked but unskinned, and 2 tbsp unsweetened dessicated coconut by the way. I got the coconut idea from Theresa at the Tropical Vegan.)

Anyway, we were getting over soymilk, well I was because I'd been eating cereal every morning because it's quick to eat before work, and I just happened to have a kilo bag of almonds and I though why not almond milk? I used to make almond milk myself with a blender and lots of patience and it was delicious (and raw) but my patience ran out so I stopped doing that. 
Ignore the cheeki bottle, I'm going to write another post about those later

For my almond milk using the machine (so much easier, funnily enough) I put 100g raw almonds in to soak for at least an hour, put them into the little filter basket, filled the jug up with 1L of water and pressed the appropriate buttons to make the machine NOT* cook it and waited. 

The end result is a lovely sweet tasting creamy almond milk. I still can't get over how these non-dairy milks are all white, by the way.

It's awesome on cereal. Works well in baking.
Makes a pretty good hot cocoa.
And an even better banana-mixed berry-chia seed-smoothie!

I haven't tried it in coffee or tea because I don't drink those beverages with milk! So you'll have to give it a go yourselves.

I can make 1L of raw almond milk, unsweetened, for $1. Cheaper almonds can be found, however, so it could cost less. Do you know how much this stuff costs in the stores? Like $10, no joke. That's why I've never had storebought before! I've got a whole list of expensive-to-buy non-dairy milks to try and make. Quinoa is one of them. Oat milk. A rice milk that tastes good (haven't been too successful yet!) Hemp? Hmm..

Oh! And it's so so so much easier to clean. All I have to do is rinse the filter basket and the blades and give the heating thing a quick wipe. All clean. With cooked soy I have to scrub the damn thing even if I do it striaght away!

*When I made this using my machine for the first time I used the same process as for soy beans, which cooks the milk...it separated and was gross. So raw it is!

2 comments:

Theresa said...

What kind of soymilker do you have? And how do you set it to not cook the almonds? I definitely want to try this. We add a few almonds to our soy milk, for extra creaminess. And, we've given up on skinning for cereal milk - too much hassle! But Andy still prefers the flavour of skinless for tea milk, so we have separate batches. But I reckon almond milk would be so great. I'll have to experiment

Emma said...

@ Theresa: I bought a SoyQuick maker. It came with a little booklet that eplains how to make all sorts of milk from soy to almond to mung bean to rice. (Mung bean? why not.)the soy quick has a start, motor, and heater button and the instructions said to make uncooked almond milk just press the motor button four times and away it goes! The only thing is it doesn't beep when it's finished which is annoying. So I just leave it for a while and then pour it into bottles. I don't even need to strain it :) I hope your maker can do it!

Yeah I was skinning them for a while, after I read it on your blog, but then one day I forgot to do it and I liked the milk better :)

Also, Nadine had it in coffee today and it mixed well and tasted fine, so it should work well in tea also.