Homemade Almond Milk and Almond Flour

I made this homemade almond milk and almond flour using these instructions from All Sorts of Pretty's blog.  My point was actually to get almond flour in order to make a gluten free birthday cake for my kids that my in-laws could both eat, but the almond milk is a handy byproduct if you want to drink it.  I like drinking it with chocolate milk powder added. :)  The recipe is super simple to make- and the only equipment required is a blender, a strainer and a flour sack towel or cheese cloth.  Two cups worth of almonds made me close to 2 mason jars worth of almond milk plus about 1-1/2 cups of almond flour.  The instructions I followed actually used about double the water I did, and you would obviously get more almond milk that way, but the thickness of the milk I ended up with seemed closer to what I remembered getting the couple of times I've bought almond milk from the store.

Ingredients:
2 cups raw almonds
4-6 cups water to soak plus another 4 cups water later.
1 tsp salt

Instructions:
Place the 2 cups of almonds into a large bowl, and cover with the 4-6 cups of water.  Add the salt, and let sit for at least 12 hours.  When you're ready to make the milk, drain the almonds and rinse them off.  Line a strainer with a flour sack towel or cheesecloth, and place over a large bowl (I like using the flour sack towel because the tighter weave means you don't have to try to pick bits of almond pulp out afterward).  Place the almonds into a blender with the water, and blend on high for 3-4 minutes or until you can see that it's creamy looking and the almond is blended into very tiny bits, then dump into the towel-lined strainer, so that the almond milk drains into the bowl.  My blender isn't big enough to hold the whole thing, so I had to do mine in two batches- I put in 1 cup almonds plus 2 cups water, blended it up and dumped it in the strainer, and then blended up the second batch.  Then, squeeze the pulp that's inside the towel over the bowl to get out as much as much of the almond milk as you can (don't throw the pulp away when it's squeezed dry!).  Put the contents of the bowl into whatever storage containers you're going to use for the milk and you now have coconut milk!

For the almond flour, dump the blended up pulp onto an ungreased cookie sheet.  Preheat your oven to about 175º.  Spread the pulp out into a thin layer on the cookie sheet, using a fork to break up any large lumps, and cook in the oven until completely dry.  If you touch the pulp and feel any moisture at all, it's not quite ready.  It took my almond pulp about 3-1/2 hours to dry completely.

At this point, the almond pulp will still be very lumpy and not quite flour like:

Once it's cooled, toss in the blender, and blend on high speed for several minutes to make the texture more flour-like.  Unless you have a more impressive blender than mine, this is not going to be the flour powder that you'll find at a store, but even with a bit of graininess, it worked perfectly fine for the recipe I used it in.

Two cups worth of almonds gave me somewhere close to 1-1/2 cups of almond flour (you can see that the half cup measuring cup in the picture above is not quite full, but it was pretty close).