 Hey there Alchemists, so today we are in my kitchen and we're going to make some nut milk for future culturing. It's a nice sunny Saturday so you can see the nice sun here. We're going to do some different projects today with almonds, nice almonds and some cashews. These are some of my favorite nuts of choice as well as my favorite nut milks. First off we're going to do the first step. Actually both of these nuts have a completely different process. With almonds they have this outer skin on the nut that actually needs a bit more processing so that we can benefit from all of these amazing irons and magnesium and proteins that are in the nut. A lot of people are going crazy about soaking their nuts and drinking more nut milks. Whereas cashews actually don't have that outer shell so we don't need to soak them that long. I'm going to show you two different processes in one in this video. With the almonds we need to soak them overnight and with the cashews around two to three hours. Today we're going to start with both of them. We're going to get to the cashew milk and then tomorrow I'll show you how to make the rest of the almond milk but it will be all in one video. With these milks you can actually continue to culture them and make amazing cashew cream. Use some of your milk if your grains or your water if your grains or simply add some of your wildest that you've caught. There's always something that you can put in there. We have preferably the best kind of nuts you can get. I'm using always organic fat trade from Gabbana here. They're amazing. They have their motto to shorten the supply chain so we can get the nuts directly pretty much from the farmer if you can get such nuts go for it. So I'm going to switch my camera view here so you can see my work area and what we're going to do for the first process. All right. So just got some bowls and some water. That's what we got to do. First start off with the almonds. I always eyeball this but you can definitely start with just a cup in order to make about four cups of almond milk. And what we're doing first why we are soaking them is because these nuts, like I said, have the skin around the edges or around the outside of the nut. And it's full of this phytic acid and enzyme inhibitors which is actually white so hard for people to eat a lot of raw nuts at once. And I'm going to put some cashews in here. And by soaking them those enzymes are actually released and we don't have them anymore which is amazing. So we can fully get those benefits from them so we just have my nuts in there. Simple as that. You can do more. We can do that. Why don't we do a little bit more. I want to do some like cultured projects with these, you know. I have so many of them so why not? Why not? And remember they do get bigger so if you fill a bowl full. They will start popping out of the bowl after they're soaked. They do double in size. And for water, depending where you are in the world, try to use de-chlorinated water here in Europe. It's pretty okay. But if you're from North America where I come from the water might be tasting like a swimming pool full of chlorine and fluoride. And in that case, I would suggest like boil your water first and let it set to room temperature or just let it evaporate for 24 hours and the chlorine will go away. There you have it. So I'm just step one soaking my nuts. And for the almonds, I'm going to be doing this overnight. You can actually let them soak for about 48 hours. And for cashews because they don't have that protective layer just about two or three hours. So don't let them go too long. Otherwise they start turning blue. All right. So it's been a couple hours. The sun is still sort of shining here. And I'm going to show you about how to do the cashew milk. It's been sitting there for a while. They're not. They haven't turned blue or anything, which happens after some time if you let them sit too long. So I'm letting those almonds continue to soak. The cashews are now ready. And I'm going to show you what I like to put in mind to make it a bit extra fun if you want to use it just as milk or if you want to use it for culture, you can keep it as raw as you like. So what we got here is we have, let's shift it all over here. The cashews, we got the declarinated water. First thing, and it just take out the soaking water. Let's become a little bit milky. And that's normal. That's where all the phytic acid's gone. And so the cashews also have plumped up quite a bit. They have a great texture. I mean, they already taste amazing and feel amazing. Oh yeah, by that way. Mm-hmm. Yeah, really good. By the way, this water is great for your plants. So save that. Put them in your plants. And now in this sort of blender idea, if you have a blender blender like a Vitamix that works beautifully, you can even go old school and use a mortal pestle. But for today, we're just going to do a hand blender because that works as well. All right, so we've got a lot of nice cashew bits here. And so around for every cup, you want to add about four cups of water. Or if you want really creamy, you can add a little bit less. That's about a liter. I'm going to add a little bit more because I let mine. So I had a little bit more in there as well. So that's good. If you want to flavor your milk or you're not cheese already, you're not male, then you can throw in some extra things. I have here a date and some cardamom pods. I think they go great in cashew milk. So I'm just going to put those in there. Just remember to de-pit your dates before you put them in there because your blender won't like those pets. All right, so I put those in there and I'm going to go blending away. Just another piece of equipment that's really great to have on hand is your nut milk bag. Of course, you could always use a sieve. Then you'll get more pulp in your milk. But if you have a nut milk bag, you can really make it milky and then get all of that pulp out of there. So I'm going to get blending and then I'll join you at the straining process. All right, here we go. All right, so what I've been doing now is pouring that nut milk through my sieve into a funnel and squeezing out that pulp. Of course, a little bit of a mess is almost always necessary. That's part of the fun. So I've been squeezing out the pulp in small batches. You can just squeeze out as much as you possibly can. If you have too big of a batch, you're going to realize things are just getting a bit out of hand. All right, I'm going to show you the pulp in a minute. Oh yeah, it's beautiful. So here we have some beautiful cashew pulp ready for the cheese making and ready for beautiful pie crusts or throwing in your sourdough bread. But ideally, you can make some amazing cheeses out of it. Even though I added some dates and some cardamom, you can get some amazing flavors. And here you go. You've got some beautiful nut milk to culture further and or just drink it up straight. It's basically activated milk. And next step, we go to almond milk. Okay, there are alchemists. So we are doing day two with the almond milk. Yesterday's cashew milk turned out so great. Already, most of it is gone, drank up and the almond and the cashew meal was actually used for all sorts of different pastes last night with some ingera. Check out the Instagram. All right, so what we're going to do now is with the almond soaked almonds. I'm just going to shift you over here. Check it out. Nice and plump. Yeah. So now we're just going to strain them. Same thing as yesterday just to give you an overview. Just throw that soaked almond water into your plants. They'll love it. Full of phytic acid, stuff that we don't really necessarily want, but your plants will be happy for. And I'm going to do the same kind of blending technique in my jar and hand mixer. And some people just eat their almonds like this, technically called activated almonds. And I'm going to put a liter of water on top of that. And this time I'm not going to sweeten it with anything because I'm probably going to be culturing it later afterwards. So just the natural, pure almond milk that we're going to do right now. All right. We're ready for this. All right. Got some bigger chunks in there. You want it to be pretty foamy. So it's looking pretty foamy. Let's see. It looks all right. Almonds have such a special taste with their raw. And I really enjoy them. So same thing. I got my bottle here. I just cleaned it out and more or less sterilized it with hot water just to make sure that it's not contaminated with anything. So let's move up the screen so we can see how this works with our nut milk bag. Super handy tool. If we can get it in there, you might even want to do this over a bowl at first before we do it over a funnel, but let's do it all in one go. In this almond milk, I'm going to use four future pie crusts, I think, or third in my sourdough bread for a more nutty flavor. Let's really squeeze it out. Good hand massage. Again, I'm going to show you what that looks like. This almond milk. Nice. Good color. Checked it out. Yeah. That's what we want. It smells almost cherry-like. I don't know if you get that, that almonds, raw almonds have this like cherry sort of flavor and smell. I need to last in your fridge a good week or so, but if you want to culture it a little less longer, and if you don't, then I would say drink it up. Fresh is always better. If you want to pasteurize it, then you can heat it up and then use it at a different date and close it up, but then you're losing some of the flavor if you're pasteurizing it. Perfect. One liter of freshly made almond milk. All right. Here we go. Nice and foamy. Bottoms up.