Almond Milk........... Why are we drinking cows milk anyway!

Raw Homemade Almond Milk (from Noveleats.com)

• 1 cup raw almonds
• 7 – 8 cups water
• Agave nectar or another sweetener (optional)

Put your almonds into a good-sized bowl and fill the bowl up with water until they are covered well.

Cover with a towel and let sit in a cool place for about 24hours
Once they are finished soaking they will have become plump.

Pour off the water from the almonds and rinse well. Place the rinsed almonds into a blender
add the 7 – 8 cups of water, and blend for a few minutes or until well blended. At this stage you can add a sweetener if you want, but I left it out myself. Since the milk can potentially be used in a variety of ways it seems that you may want to leave the sweetener out.

When it is done blending it will look something like this…

…and it will have a lot of froth on top.

Strain the almond milk through a fine sieve into your original bowl or another large container. We used to have a bag strainer, but found it hard to clean, so I used our small sieve.

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As you are straining it you will be getting a lot of almond meal. It is up to you if you want to conserve this or throw it out. You can do a variety of things with it – i.e. dehydrate it, turn it into a flour, mix it into some bread, etc.

After you have finished straining it,
You can strain even further, but it is up to you. The final result – about a half gallon of good and easy almond milk. Store in the refrigerator and try to use within a week. You will need to stir the almond milk every time you bring it out of the refrigerator to use since it does settle.

In thinking about making your own milk there are a couple of things to consider. Firstly, it amazes me how many ingredients are in commercial vegan milks....

My Notes: This wonderful recipe & pics came from a beautiful website called Novel Eats & here's the link for the fuller & continued recipe, 
http://www.noveleats.com/drinks/raw-homemade-almond-milk/
CLICK HERE.

I use only 6 cups of filtered water & since I have a smaller blender then I do 2 batches, putting 1/2 of the soaked water into the blender with 3c water at a time.

Also, when straining be sure to lightly push the pulp down to stain out more of the milk.
Pulp can be used in homemade granola or whatever else you can think of.