Homemade Nut Milk (technique)

Homemade Nut Milk is easy to make and both cheaper and healthier than buying it at the store. What you can find in the store often has added preservatives, thickeners, and sweeteners. Here is a really simple way to make your own nut milk that is sugar-free, gum-free, and delicious.

You can use any kind of nuts or seeds for nut milk, you can even use nut butter in a pinch. Nut milk offers a great alternative to dairy and has less carbohydrate content as well. This recipe has only a trace amount of carbohydrates per serving.

To make your own nut milk you will need a nut milk bag or 2 layers of cheesecloth for filtering your milk. There are some nuts that don’t require filtering and will produce naturally thicker milk. I have found that cashews are so smooth they don’t need any filtering.

My favorite Homemade Nut Milks are made with macadamia, cashew, and almond. I recommend soaking the nuts for at least 8 hours and up to 24 before blending them. Soaking nuts and seeds will encourage better digestion. Nuts have many naturally occurring antinutrients that make digestion more difficult and can cause gut inflammation and leaky gut. There are enzyme inhibitors, phytic acids, and lectins found in different amounts in all nuts. Just by soaking your nuts you can neutralize a large part of these existing antinutrients and help your digestion.

Yield: 5 cups

Author: Yvonne Tomlinson

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Homemade Nut Milk (technique)

Prep time: 15 MinInactive time: 8 HourTotal time: 8 H & 15 M

Ingredients

• 1 cup nuts & seeds, raw, organic (sunflower, pumpkin, sesame, flax, hemp, almond, cashew, walnut, pecan, hazelnut, or macadamia)
• 1 Tbsp sea salt
• 2 cups of filtered water or enough to cover nuts completely for soaking
• 4 cups of filtered water for blending

Instructions

1. Place 1 cup of raw nuts or seeds in a ceramic or glass bowl and cover with 2 cups of filtered water, soaking for 8-24 hours. (1 cup of nuts would be about ½ cup of nut butter). A mason jar works well also.
2. Once the soaking is complete, drain and rinse the nuts or seeds. Get rid of all the soaking water.
3. Place them in a high-powered blender with 4 cups of filtered water and blend until smooth and a nice milky color is created.
4. Strain the milk through a nut bag or 2 layers of cheesecloth (a clean kitchen towel also works)
5. Add any optional ingredients such as 1 tsp. vanilla extract, ½ tsp. vanilla powder, ½ tsp. cinnamon, or a few drops of stevia.
6. Store in glass jars and refrigerate for up to 1 week.

Notes

Save the nut or seed pulp and use it in recipes to replace some of the other flours. If you want to make flour from the pulp, and not use it right away, you can dehydrate the nut pulp and blend it into a fine powder.