Homemade Almond Milk

I've been wanting to make almond milk from scratch for some time, but it always seemed like too much work. But when I came across this recipe on Oh She Glows, I thought, this is doable. As always, I made a couple of exceptions: I didn't have a nut-milk bag, and I didn't use vanilla, because buying dried vanilla beans is expensive! I thought the flavors from the dates and cinnamon would be plenty.

I soaked my raw almonds--and dates, which is suggested if they are not very soft to start with--for about five hours. The recipe doesn't say how much water to soak them in, but I just made sure they were well covered with water. (You can also soak them over night.)

Then I drained and rinsed the soaked almonds and dates.

I then blended the almonds and dates with 3.5 cups of water on high for about a minute. 

Next, I thought I would use my fine-mesh strainer plus a cheesecloth to strain the liquid from the pulp, but the cheesecloth turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, and the fine-mesh strainer was plenty fine on its own to keep the pulp out. I poured the blender contents into the strainer, removing pulp as it filled up and got clogged, to make room for more blender contents.

Eventually I got all my liquid through with a significant amount of pulp leftover on the side (I thought I might do something creative with this, but it just ended up in the trash).

I have to say, this is the best almond milk I've tasted. I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that it's sweetened with dates and cinnamon, but it also just tastes so fresh--because it is! The recipe says it only keeps 3-5 days, so this isn't the most practical recipe for one person, unless that one person consumes a whole lot of almond milk. I still have some left seven days later, and while it doesn't taste or smell bad, I'm still a little reluctant to use it (but that hasn't stopped me).

So this probably won't be a regular thing, but if I ever needed to use a lot of almond milk for a recipe, I might go through the trouble to do it again. It was so delicious!