Making your plant milk at home is easy, uses less packaging, and contains no unnecessary, and potentially harmful additives . What are you waiting for?
NUT MILK
Ingredients
1 cup nuts ( I usually use a mix of almonds and hazelnuts but you can also use other nuts or seeds such as pumpkin seeds)
4-5 cups water
Blender
Nut milk bag
METHOD
- Soak the nuts in enough hot water to cover (from the kettle) for an hour (or more).
- Drain and rinse
- Add fresh water
- Blend
- Strain through a nut milk bag, muslin or other fine weave cloth. This time you can squeeze to get as much liquid as you can out.
- Pour into your preferred container and refrigerate.
OAT AND NUT MILK
My plant milk of choice at the moment is a mix of oat and nut milk. Because the oat milk is best filtered through a sieve and the nut milk though a nut milk bag I find it easiest to make a half batch of each and then mix them together in a bottle at the end. To make the oat milk part I keep it super simple and rinse 1 part of oats then blend with 3 parts of water and strain through 2 sieves on top of each other. I find squeezing the oats through a nut milk bag is difficult as the oats swell up. Then I make the nut milk exactly as above and mix the 2 together.
Because the sieve allows small particles of the oats through you will need to shake it before use as the small bits settle to the bottom. If there is a lot of sediment when I’m nearing the bottom of the bottle I often add more water and give it a good shake again to make it last a bit longer.
WHAT TO DO WITH THE OAT AND NUT PULP
After making these you will be left with a small amount of oat pulp and rather more nut pulp. Don’t throw this away as it can be used up in many recipes – I often share how I use it over in my instagram account. Some of my favourites are in homemade granola, in bread, cookies and cake. Treading my own Path blog has a great recipe for vegan chocolate brownies using nut pulp. The oat pulp can easily be added to porridge. You can add some nut pulp in place of tahini and I have tried fermenting it to make vegan cheese before.
Do let me know how you get on if you give this a try – and if you have other ideas for using the nut/oat pulp.