I’ve been wanting to make almond and other nut milks with my vitamix (especially since Adelaide still seems to be dairy-intolerant), but I keep forgetting to pick up cheese cloth at the grocery, and in all honesty, I hate using it. It’s a pain to wash clean, I always rip it, and I feel like I never fold it correctly and end up losing half of what I’m trying to strain. I prefer using coffee filters to make my homemade ricotta and yogurt cheese, but it’s too fine to work well with nut milks. Well, enter Lowe’s hardware store for solving that problem! You don’t need to buy a fancy nut milk bag ($15!). You can use a paint strainer, sold in the painting aisle of your local home improvement store for $1. Yep, you can get a two-pack for just $2.
It even has a great elastic top that fits right over the blender to make pouring super easy.
To make my almond milk, I soaked 1 cup of almonds overnight in water. I strained them the next morning, dumped them in the vitamix and added 5 cups of water, then blended them for about 1 minute on high speed. Strained them, squeezed the pulp and voila, easy almond milk.
Now what to do with the leftover pulp? I dumped the remaining pulp out on my silpat-lined cookie sheet and baked it at 300 for 30 minutes to dry it out a bit, then dumped on oats, cinnamon, a pinch of salt, sesame seeds, raisins, honey and coconut oil to make granola. I baked it for 45-ish minutes, stirring every 15 or so minutes (a few minutes too long… oops) and then let it cool completely (do not stir the last time you take it out if you like your granola “clumpy”). Perfect for topping my homemade yogurt for an afternoon snack.
Once again, it was pinterest to the rescue for providing lots of crafty ideas from blogs all over the interwebz.
