 Hello friends, Heidi here from Rain Country. God is good, all the time. And today I'm going to be making my Picon Cashew Milk and the Picon Cashew Cheese or Vegan Cheese. Now I do have a video showing how I make the vegan cheese and I'll go ahead and post that right up here so I won't show you that whole process. The only difference between what the cheese I make today and the one I made in that video is this is going to be a blend of cashews and pecans which is my favorite. The cashews alone make a really good thick creamy cheese but they added with the pecans in it. It just adds in just a much nicer flavor that I like even better. However, I did try making a pecans cheese by itself and it was really good. However, it didn't have the same creamy texture that the cashew cheese or the pecans had. So just a little set a couple of tips on that if you want to try doing that. But again, check out that video to see how I turn it in a cheese. Let's make the milk today. So what I have here, if you were watching my last This and That video, this is actually the next day that I'm shooting this. And you would have seen me show this little jar of pecans and cashews. Now look at the difference in color. It's soaked really well. And because I still like to have my milk, it's just more pleasing to us. Look as white as possible. I don't feel it's as necessary to drain and rinse the pecans and cashews after soaking them, especially the cashews. However, for the sake of having a more white looking milk, I prefer to drain them and then rinse them off a little bit. The pecans are really going to change the color. So what I'll do is I'm going to put it. I'm going to take this over the sink and then I'm going to pour it through this mesh strainer and then I'm going to rinse them and then I'll move on to the next step. Okay, now the it's still going to have color to it your milk because look at what it did to the cashews. The cashews are no longer white. They're kind of almost purple looking because of the pecans staining them. So it's just something you got to realize. Now I'm going to take all of this and pour them into here. I forgot to mention on the ratios, I use one to one as far as parts and I usually use a cup or better than a cup total. So maybe a nice well-rounded cup of cashews and a well-rounded half cup of pecans. You can do even half cups. I just like to make it good and rich. The more nut to use in this, the richer it's going to be. So and then I just I put it in my jar. It should fill up to about right here. I don't even measure it. I just fill it up to a little better than half way and that's going to be a cup and then I top it off with my filtered rainwater. So now that I've rinsed and then oh and then and then if you didn't see my previous video, I like to let them soak for at least eight hours. I usually just leave it overnight and then deal with it in the morning. So now I'm going to be adding three to four cups of filtered rainwater to the blender along with the nuts. Let's go ahead and go with four cups on this. It's going to make it again just like with since I have a lot of nuts in there, I feel comfortable using four full cups. Just keep in mind the more water to nut ratio, you have the thinner consistency on the milk you're going to get. We have some people suggest adding a little bit of gelatin, like a good grass-fed beef gelatin to your milk to give it a thicker consistency and that's a really good option. I tried it once and I didn't personally really care for it but I'm going to use a little bit too much of gelatin. I didn't measure it out. I just put some in there. But it's just something to think about, maybe just a teaspoon. I think a couple ladies in here may be able to tell me how much they use. Okay, so now that I nut the water and all the nuts in there, again, you can just use three cups of water nut for, especially if you're using just a cup of nuts. I'm just going to turn the blender on high and just let it pull right so that's really good. Now, if you're making this just for the milk and you plan on using it, you're going to get a little bit of gelatin. You're making this just for the milk and you plan on using the pulp in something like cookies or breads and stuff. You can go ahead and add a vanilla extract or some other extract to this. I would say about a teaspoon to a tablespoon depending on the extract and it'll add a really nice flavor to the milk. However, since I'm going to be making a cheese out of the pulp, I really don't want the vanilla flavor in there. Now, I like to stick a spoon down in here and just kind of stir it up and see if I can look real close and see how well processed that is. I think I'm going to go a little bit longer and this is when you're going to want to add your extract so it can blend in there really well. Okay, that should be sufficient. Now, I'm going to move on to the next step and that is simply, I've got a couple layers of cheesecloth here over one of my mesh strainer. I find this is the easiest thing to do and then over a measuring cup. You may want to use a bigger measuring cup than what I've got here anyway and I'm just going to pour this through here. If you choose to drink your milk straight and not want to add any gelatin to it to increase the viscosity that will help keep it, the thing about having a higher viscosity is it will help keep it from separating your nut milk. When you buy store-bought nut milk, they have a bunch of stabilizers and stuff in there. Usually it's garbage, it's junk you don't want to be adding to your diet. Like the cariginin, it's a seaweed and it sounds great and it's natural but it can be very hard on the human gut. It's really not meant for human consumption in that way because it can tear up. Especially if you already have gut issues, it's something you should really avoid. And then who knows what else? I know, I have noticed they started bringing out some healthier nut milks that don't have so much additives in them. However, the nice thing about having an increased viscosity is that it will keep that from separating. Otherwise, what I do, I just shake the milk before I use it so that I mix all the goodness in there, the fats and all that. So anyway, I just pour it through there and I start squeezing it out like this. I still have more to go through but I like to get some of that squeezed out a little bit first because otherwise it gets too full. The better thing to do is use the bigger strainer. I have the whole set and then use the eight cup measuring cup and then you don't have to keep stopping and doing this so much. But you will eventually, if you're going to turn this into cheese, well no matter what, you want to get as much milk out of there as possible, you're still going to find squeezing this out to be a really good option. Okay, then just make sure if you're going to store it in the jar like I'm doing, you get a funnel, you can't even funnel put it in there. I hope you keep it from making such a big mess. And I still got more milk to go but I just wanted to get that out of my way. Again, using a bigger measuring cup you want to take as many steps. And I'm going to go ahead and add a little bit of my homemade almond extract. That way we can get a little bit of almond, a little bit of catching a little bit of a con all in one. And so what I'm going to do is keep pouring this through here and keep squeezing out as much as I can. Okay, so once it gets to the point that it's kind of hard to squeeze any more out of there, which is not really there yet. But then I find that if I just kind of massage it like this and then squeeze it again, I get a lot more coming out. So I can all just keep doing that. Now you can also walk off and leave it for a bit and just keep coming back to it and until you get all that really wonderful milk out of there. And then you've got all that great pulp in there that you can either, as I said before, like I said, I'm going to be making vegan cheese today. But you can either dehydrate it up in your food dehydrator or just on trays on top of your, close to a wood stove or high up on top on a rack on top of your wood stove. That's what I do. And then use like a coffee grinder or even your blender or whatever to process it. If I find a coffee grinder works better for that to make it, once it's dry, then process it up into a coffee grinder and it will make it finer. And you can use it as a flower in making crackers and breads. Or you can even use the moist pulp just as it is in things like muffins or quick breads, such as like a zucchini bread or apple bread or that pumpkin bread, that kind of stuff works really great in those or pancakes, really good in pancakes as well. So those are some options to use your pulp up so you're not wasting anything and you're actually taking a cup to one and a half cups of nuts instead of just eating the nut like that, you're actually getting a lot more out of it because you're getting a mill. You can use this milk and just about anything. You can use it in your coffee, use it in your jet field latte, use it in on your cereal, use it to bake with whatever it is that you typically would like to use a milk for. And then you have the pulp to bake with or make cheese out of it. You're getting so much more out of those nuts by doing that. So and you can use any kind of nuts. And in fact, I want to say this before I forget, I got the initial idea of blending a couple of different nuts from Melanie over at Road to the Farm because she likes to do, I think it is almond pecan and cashew all together. And I don't recall if I tried all three of them yet, but I know I really like these two together. Just makes a good, rich, wonderful flavor. All right, I want to bring in here kind of close so you can see what this looks like. I actually strained it out just a little bit too much for wanting to make cheese. I'd like it a little bit softer consistency than that. So if you're going to turn it into a cheese, you want to keep just a little bit of your liquid still in there, but I could still strain more of this out. So if I was going to turn this into a flour, then I would strain a bunch more of it out and get it as dry as possible. Even if I was going to use it without dehydrating and something baking, I'd still try to get as much of the milk out of the pulp as I can. But this is just slightly on the dry side for a cheese. I might even pour just a little bit of the milk back in there. We'll see. Because once you add your other ingredients to it, you're going to need it to have a little bit of moisture in there. All right, so here is my cashew pecan cheese. I just made it through a little sprig of rosemary on the top to make it look good. But I did add some fresh rosemary to the cheese itself and it is so yummy. I can hardly wait to spread this on a nori wrap. Maybe add a little bit of black and red pepper to it. And it should be pretty tasty. And then here is the cashew pecan milk. So it's going to have a kind of off white color to it. Well, all your nut milks will typically have an off white color to it. This is going to be more off white than usual, like closer to a T-on almost. And I don't know how well the camera is picking up the color of that. But it's very tasty and a little bit of almond extract that I added to it. Just added even more flavor to it. Another thing you can think to do to add more sweetness to it is throw in a couple of those module dates I've talked about in other videos. It just adds a really nice flavor as well. And then you'll do that as you're blending it in the blender because you're going to want to strain out the skins and stuff like that from the dates. But it just gives it a really nice flavor and a little bit of natural sweetness with all those great minerals in there. And I think that will also make it really kid friendly as well too adding a couple of dates. Well, I hope you enjoyed this video and that you learned something new. Thanks for watching. Take care and God bless.