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Almond Milk

Almond milk is very straightforward to make at home,and it goes with my general ethos of if you can make it then you should as you will know all of the ingredients that went into it and there will be no additives to prolong the shelf life. It does take a little bit of forward planning as the almonds need to soak overnight, but if you use a lot of it then it should be easy to get into a routine.

Ingredients

Almonds and water

You will also need: A beaker to soak the almonds in overnight, a blender to blitze the almonds, a sieve and bowl and a muslin cloth as the sieve will not be fine enough to extract the milk from.

 

Making almond milk is about volume rther than weight, so fill your container about 1/4 full of nuts and cover with fresh water.
Leave on the counter top overnight for the almonds to soften. I use whole almonds with the skins on as I want to retain the fibre of the skins.
The next morning the water will look a bit murkey and so the nuts need to be rinsed in clean water.
Pour the nuts and water into the sieve and throw away the dirty water. put the nuts into the beaker you will be blending the milk in. I am using a nutribullet as this is a high powered motor to extract all the nutrients out of the nuts, but before I had one of these I used a regular blender.
Top up with fresh clean water to cover generously
leave enough room at the top to allow movement of the blender in accordance with your machine.
Blend like you would a smoothy until you can not see any more chunks of nut. they will be quite soft because of the overnight soaking.
Take your sieve and place a fine muslin cloth on top of the sieve and place it on top of a bowl /jug to catch the milk.
Pour the almond milk smoothy through the muslin cloth so the milk falls into the bowl below.

Remove as much of the liquid as possible, by taking the ends of the cloth and twisting it to force the liquid into the bowl
You will be left with a hard lump of ground almonds
I spread the left over ground almonds on a baking tray and dry gently in a low oven. To be honest there is not a lot of flavour left in them at this point but as almonds are expensive I use them to bulk out packets of ground almonds that I use to make 90 second bread. 
The almond milk can then be decanted into a suitable jug and stored in the fridge until needed, it lasts for a couple of days.

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