Almond milk seems to be the go-to drink for those who are lactose intolerant or have milk allergies. I personally don’t fall into either category, but after one sip of Silk PureAlmond Vanilla, my taste buds were in heaven, immediately demanding that I have another sip (which will inevitably turn into an entire glass… the tall kind… for dessert… because it’s THAT good!).
I’ve seen recipes for making it from scratch and honestly thought it would be difficult (or time consuming, which I’m not very fond of either), but it turns out it was neither. You don’t need many ingredients either: almonds, filtered water, and sugar. Well shoot, I’ve got all that in my pantry. There goes another excuse why you can’t make it either!
Since my love for almond milk started with Silk, we’ll use them for comparison purposes.
Silk PureAlmond Original
Ingredients & Nutrition: All Natural Almondmilk (filtered water, almonds), All Natural Evaporated Cane Juice, Calcium Carbonate, Sea Salt, Natural Vanilla Flavor, Locust Bean Gum, Gellan Gum, Sunflower Lecithin, d-alpha-Tocopherol (natural vitamin E), Zinc Gluconate, Vitamin A Palmitate, Riboflavin (B2), Vitamin B12, Vitamin D2.
Price: $1.47 for 16oz (according to Amazon)
Taste: I could drink this all day, every day. Forever. Seriously.
Satisfaction: See “taste” above.
Homemade Almond Milk (recipe here)
Ingredients & Nutrition: Almonds, filtered water, sugar.
Price: $1.32 for almonds and $.03 for sugar, both purchased in bulk from Costco. Water is free.
Taste: Pretty darn good. There’s some internal satisfaction that tells me everything I make from scratch always tastes better than store-bought, but my dad and good friends have reviewed my milk and they say it’s pretty good as well. Conclusion – I’m not biased.
Satisfaction: It quenches my desire for milk, but doesn’t give me that “super full” feeling that Silk does. I’m guessing that’s a good thing though.
The Winner? It’s a tie. On taste alone, store-bought wins. However, we need to be take into consideration nutrition and actually knowing what goes into our food (locust bean gum?!). The homemade version also provides us with ground almonds when the process is done. I’ve used these ground almonds in muffins and granola bars instead of whole nuts. Why throw away perfectly good almonds? That’s just silly.
We don’t drink cows milk in our home and have tried all the alternatives. Almond milk dominates all!! Our favorite brand by far is Almond Breeze! We want to make our own but need a better blender. Were getting a vitamix in a few weeks so we will be ready to go!!
We don’t have a super-great blender so I use a hand-held chopper/blender gadget from Cuisinart. You could probably make it work with the blender you have – the key would be to soak the Almonds longer (the longer you soak, the softer they become) and “blend” with 3/4 cup of water at first. When it seems the almonds can’t get any smaller, add the other ingredients.