Do you have a preferred non-dairy milk?
Luckily, we don’t need to be lactose-free in our house, though there was a little friend some years ago who was dairy-free, so I got used to using Pure to cook with, to having Swedish Glace dairy-free icecream in the freezer, and even soya milk occasionally. Though I’m not a fan of soya milk…
I was offered the chance to try some almond milks – Almond Breeze, from Blue Diamond – and since I love almonds (there’s always an open packet here, for snacking on) I thought I’d say yes. They kindly sent me two: one ‘original’ and one ‘unsweetened’.
Because I was hesitant about the ‘sweetened’ version (sweet milk?), I decided to try making yoghurt with it. I have a yoghurt maker, because we do get through a lot of yoghurt, and there are lots of recipes for almond milk yoghurt on the web… How hard can it be? I thought. Instead of using live yoghurt as a starter, which I’d usually use for ‘normal’ yoghurt, I bought some freeze-dried yoghurt starter, and I added a little extra sugar, so the culture would have something to eat.
Oh dear.
It went well for the first few hours, but overnight the yoghurt split and curdled, turning a rather unpleasant grey colour. I wasn’t expecting it to be exactly the same – because almond milk just isn’t the same colour as dairy milk – but this was a disaster.
Checking up on the Almond Breeze site, it does say ‘don’t make yoghurt’—and now I know why.
However, the unsweetened almond milk experiment worked very well.
It has a pleasant and extremely mild taste, and worked well in hot chocolate (the hot chocolate drinker in the house said it was ‘awesome’ – hmmm) and was surprisingly OK in tea: I thought it might taste a bit odd, but it really didn’t.
We enjoyed it on cereals in the morning, and even in porridge (use gluten free oats, obviously – and only if you can tolerate them).
And today I made a medieval apple almond soup, from A Feast of Ice and Fire: The Official Game of Thrones Companion Cookbook
A bonus is that Almond Breeze is not only lower in calories and carbs than cows milk, but also has just as much calcium, so if this is something that matters to you – and it should be – then you could switch without losing the calcium benefits.
Will we switch? Well, we don’t need to be dairy-free, so probably not all the way—besides, I really like yoghurt—but next time I have a dairy-free visitor, I’ll look for almond milk.
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Almond Breeze still has too many additives/preservatives for my “sanity” so I tried making it myself a couple of times. All you need is a food processor or a vitamix, a nut bag or ,cheesecloth(if you don’t mind little bits of nuts don’t bother with the nut bag) and the ingredients themselves and you can save yourself a ton of money and come away with pure almond milk without all the nasty stuff my body doesn’t recognize as food any way. It really is quick and easy and I always have almonds in the house anyway. Just throw a few in too soak a few hours and make 1-2-3 cups or whatever I need when I want it.
If you’re a fan of bananas, try adding a little banana to it, a few less nuts and you get banana milk. This is excellent also in so many things.
Interesting – I did see a nut bag on Amazon. So do you just soak the nuts in water and then whizz them up?
Here’s an easy recipe.
Myself, I’m always experimenting with it though. I have a tendency, I’ll also throw in some chia, flax, a teaspoon of avocado or EV olive oil etc.
The amounts here are for 4 1/2 cups but I usually just make a 1/2 cup or so at a time – whatever I need for what I’m doing. That’s because it needs to be used within 3-4 days or it starts to go rancid in the refrigerator.
Ingredients:
1/2 cup raw nuts (your choice almonds, cashews, walnuts whatever)
4 cups water
tiny pinch of sea salt
If you want sweet milk, you can add some honey or maple syrup to taste (start with 1 tsp and go up)
Soak the nuts about 6-8 hours. Drain.
Add the nuts and 4 cups water into your vitamix or processor and blend till nuts chopped finely. Strain through cheesecloth, sieve or nut bag. Keep refrigerated.
If you are using the milk for cereal or in oatmeal or something, don’t even strain. The little bits of nuts left in it are good in cereal or with fruit or grains.
For banana milk, use 1 1/2 frozen bananas, 2 cups water, 1/4 cup (or less) soaked nuts, 1 T. oil (flax, coconut or avocado works good) and a pinch of sea salt. If you like it sweet, throw in a soaked date (about 15 minutes in water).
Use immediately, do not store.
Give them a try and play around with it until you find your favorite combination. It only takes a couple of minutes in a blender and it’s a whole lot better for you than the stuff you buy from those boxes.