The Time I Made My Own Nut Milk
I like to practice what I preach, so for the integrity of this blog, I endeavored to make my own nut milk (or “mylk”, I suppose) after writing the blog on Alternative Milks (read it here). I did fear this would be the gateway activity into things like buying a goat to milk, culturing my own yogurt, donning hankerchiefs and squashing grapes for personal sulfite-free wine like I Love Lucy, but I clung to the faith in my own laziness and promised myself this would not render me full-on “she’s gone granola.” Thankfully, after this snafu, I remain loyal to commercially-prepared formulas.
Other dietitians and “clean-eating gurus” will balk. OF COURSE, it’s always healthier to make your own ____ (overnight oats, vegetable/herb garden, pasta, etc.) but this was just not a sustainable experience for me! That’s what Essence Nutrition is all about; a sustainable way of eating for YOU: not your mom, not your postman, not your best friend. Whatever kind of nutrition lifestyle appeases YOUR palate, budget, time-constraints, culture, etc. is the kind that Essence wants you to feed.
Anyhoo, I impulse-bought my own nut milk kit while flipping through a magazine whilst getting a pedicure and thought, hm, I definitely want to spend $25.00 that I don’t have right now! (Note to self: 2016 resolution: stop reading magazines while getting pedicures and emerge from salon with eight online purchases). A few days later, the nut milk mason jar of my dreams arrived.
This business is LABOR INTENSIVE. First, you have to boil water and “sterilize” the sock filter. Sock filter, were you a naughty naughty sock filter before coming to my apartment in your past life? Were you being wanton in your ways and catering to many a person’s raw nut milk needs? What needs to be boiled off of you and killed, exactly? You then have to boil water (again) and pour it over two cups of raw nuts (which by the way, are EXPENSIVE. One pound of raw nuts is about 13 dollars). You then have to let them soak for an hour. Now we are already at about 1.5 hours of preparation. Once you filter the nuts from the water (mess alert, thank goodness the kitchen spaniel is adept at lapping up liquid from the floor), they then have to be transferred to a blender and filled with more filtered water and ground to a paste (along with some salt and spices, to your liking). Of course, my blender wasn’t fastened on tight enough which resulted in a deluge of nut milk all over the counter which happened to resemble vomit. Cute.
You have to finagle the sock filter over the mason jar and pour the nut paste into the filter. It’s not exactly the most viscous of substances, so again, half of it wound up on the floor (happy spaniel) and left much residue in the blender. You then fill the jar up with filtered water and let the mixture sit for for SIX HOURS. Oh, and then you have to boil the damn sock again and hang it out to dry. I’m not even that kind to my silk blouses.
Well by this time, I’m downright parched. I am nowhere close to having nut milk, I am much poorer (the cost of the kit, the nuts, the spices, and 800 Lysol wipes to clean the muck), and I’ve Cinderella-ed the hell out of my kitchen related to the ample mess. Because this nut milk is so “clean” and pure, it doesn’t have preservatives, which leads me to think it will only keep for a couple of days. So I better get to guzzling f I don’t want all this to be in vain.
Yes, it’s healthier. Yes, there are no scary additives, preservatives, carrageenan, or chemicals. Yes, you are at the liberty to make fun milks like brazil nut, hemp, sunflower, etc. that may be harder to find in grocery stores. Yes, you can go wild with abandon and flavor your milks with infinite algorithms of spices and flavorings. But I will never get back the eight hours of my life it took to produce this delicate creation, and now I’m stuck with a gallon of artisanal nut milk. I’ll shell out 2-3 dollars for unsweetened, organic nut milk in a box any day from now on.
Essentially Yours,
Monica