DIY almond milk from scratch

Two weeks ago, I blogged here about how I'd discovered a new, simple method for making your own almond milk at home by blending almond butter in water (with a little salt and sugar). We tried this with some commercial almond butter from Costco, and the result wasn't bad, but it didn't work well for cocoa; the toasted-almond flavor was so strong that it completely drowned out the flavor of the cocoa powder. But I wondered if it might be possible to produce a homemade almond milk with a milder flavor, more similar to the commercial stuff, by making our own almond butter from blanched rather than roasted almonds.

I can now say definitively that the answer is yes. But it's still not perfect, and it's a bit of a hassle.

Making this completely-from-scratch almond milk last weekend was a multi-stage process:

1. 
   First, Brian blanched the almonds using the process outlined by Alpha Foodie. The blog claims this process only takes five minutes, but it takes rather longer if you're processing a cup of almonds at once. As the recipe notes, peeling them is quite easy: just pinch them and they shoot right out of their skins (and go skidding across the table if you're not careful). But you can only do that to one almond at a time, so it takes a good while to get through a cupful.
2. Then, he ground the almonds into butter using Alice Waters' recipe. Here's where he encountered his second snag: The almonds wouldn't grind easily. He tried it in both the Magic Bullet and the food processor, and in both cases, the motor started to burn. He ended up having to add roughly a quarter-cup of canola oil to the almonds just to reduce them to a paste, and he would have added more if he hadn't been afraid of mucking up the texture. Maybe our little food processor doesn't qualify as the "sturdy" model that Waters recommends.
3. He took a tablespoon of this blanched-almond butter and blended it up with two cups of filtered water, a teaspoon and a half of sugar, and an eighth-teaspoon of salt. That's roughly equivalent to the pinch of salt and single date recommended in the Nest and Glow recipe.

As you can see here, the resulting almond milk had a much lighter color than the stuff made from commercial almond butter. It had a much lighter flavor, too, very close to the almond milk we buy in cartons at the store. The big difference between this and the commercial product was texture. 

Brian ground the almond butter as finely as he could and then blended it very thoroughly with the water, but it still didn't blend completely. There were tiny solid particles suspended in the liquid, which precipitated out when it sat overnight. Getting them back into suspension wasn't a big problem; I just gave the bottle a good shake, the same way I do with the carton of commercial almond milk. But the little flecks of almond in my breakfast cocoa gave it a rather chewier texture than I'm used to.

Mind you, this was only our first attempt, and it's possible we might be able to get the almond milk a little smoother with a little tweaking. Maybe processing the almonds in our big blender on the "grind" setting would work better than using our little Magic Bullet or our little food chopper. Or maybe we could simply strain the almond milk after blending it. But that would also add a fourth step to the process, making it more work than before.

So we're going to need to fiddle with this recipe a bit more before we decide if it can really take the place of our packaged almond milk from Lidl. It comes down to two questions: (1) can we come up with a method that produces a reasonably smooth homemade almond milk, and (2) if we do, is the process simple enough to make it worth the effort. We've still got most of our initial batch of homemade almond butter to work with, so we'll definitely be making at least a few more batches, and perhaps by the time we're done we'll have come up with a method that's workable.

If we do, we'll have the ultimate ecofrugal plant-based milk: half the price of dairy milk, with practically no packaging. But even if we don't, it's good to know that we always have this DIY almond milk as a backup. Now if we're snowed up for days at a time and can't make it to the store, we can always produce a tolerable version of almond milk from ingredients we always have on hand — just so long as the power stays on, that is.