let the nut milk adventures begin

I brewed my first nut milk last Wednesday while making a pumpkin and chicken-of-the-wood mushroom curry.

chicken-of-the-wood mushroom

Now I am totally hooked.
The milk was made with the guts and seeds of a small sugar pumpkin. Take the guts and seeds, add half the amount pure water (for a 2:1 ratio) and blend it up with a blender. Now you have a chunky milk puree. Well, there is another step to achieve nut milk. Pour all of the pulp into cheesecloth, muselin, or a piece of porous cotton (like a piece of summer-weight bedsheet) and catch all of the milk in a container. Feel free to give the "nut-bag" a squeeze to wring all of the milk out of the pulp. Now you are left with two fantastic products: 1. fresh, nutritious, delicious nut milk 2. nutritious and delicious nut pulp.
My second experiment with nut milk involved soaked almonds, peanuts, and walnuts. I soaked the nuts overnight and then the first thing I did in the morning was puree them in the blender with a little less water than nuts. The result? A delicious, unprecedented nut milk, perfect for Robert's morning coffee with a spoonful of agave nectar.
Later on that day I used some soaked almonds and hazelnuts for another batch of nut milk. The result? An intensely flavorful nut milk. Oh man, those hazelnuts are powerful!

hazelnuts/filberts

Nut milk pulp can be used in any baking application. This morning I used my almond-peanut-walnut pulp to make blackberry jam thumbprint cookies.

Just now I infused my fudge brownies with a splash of hazelnut-almond milk.

As I write this the leftover hazelnut-almond pulp is mingling with lactic acid rich sauerkraut juice to ferment into "nut cheese"! I'm letting the magic proceed overnight and in the morning I should have a tasty batch of fresh, tangy nut cheese. (There are multiple approaches to making nut cheese. One could skip the fermentation and simply dry it out in a disc shape until it forms a "rind" or season the damp pulp and enjoy your "cheese" spread immediately! I'll know when my cheese is ready when bubbles have formed - similar to a sourdough.)

nut cheese

My favorite of these milks was the first one, the pumpkin nut/gut milk. With just a dash of cinnamon and a spoonful of maple syrup, I had the most intensely "pumpkin pie" flavored beverage. It is most definitely crave-worthy. Just because Halloween has come and gone, doesn't mean you can't still eat pumpkins! Pumpkin meat makes the best soups and curries, and of course pie. While roasted pumpkin seeds are a great snack, I hope you will try using them to make pumpkin milk!