Sunday, February 1, 2015

leftover pulp from almond milk

As you know I'm allergic to the casein protein in milk.  So to get some creamy goodness for my tea, coffee, hot chocolate and ice cream I make and use nut-milks.  Some nut-milks can be drank without straining like cashew milk after blitzing in the blender for three minutes (some people do strain cashew milk).  Almond milk however tastes best strained; it has a gritty mouth feel, to me, if you don't.

So what do you do with the leftover pulp?  Some folks actually throw it out, but I can't.  Seems a waste to me, so I went out on the web looking for recipes that use almond milk pulp and ended up at Elana Pantry.  She has some great recipes that use almond milk pulp and a boat load of them use almond flour (very finely ground almonds).

What I usually do with the pulp is save it up in the freezer and then dehydrate the pulp-patties until dry.  Then, one at a time, I break them up and pulverize them in the blender.  I sift the contents of the blender just in case I don't get everything ground up.  Regrind anything that needs it with the next broke-up patty.

One of the things I do with the resulting almond flour is to save it to make chocolate chip cookies for Sister Suzy to take to set as her theater director has Celiac disease.  Today I tried a new recipe for almond flour, Chocolate Coconut Macaroons from Elana's Gluten-free Almond Flour cookbook.  Oh, My, Good!

(A copyright free image)


I did modify her recipe a little, as usual.  LOL  I only used 3/4 cup of honey instead of 1 cup of agave nectar and the recipe on the proceeding page was for Almond Macaroons.  Yeah, why not, Almond Chocolate Coconut Macaroons!  So I added 1 teaspoon of almond extract to the blend.  This is what I ended up with:

3 egg whites

1/2 teaspoon of salt

1 teaspoon of almond extract

3/4 cup honey

1/4 cup of cocoa powder

1 1/2 cups of my almond flour

1 1/2 cups of shredded coconut, should have been 2 but that was all I had.

Preheat oven to 350.  I lined a cookie sheet with parchment paper so nothing would stick.  I whisked the egg whites until they were frothy.  Then, added the next three ingredients and whisked very well.  I sifted the cocoa powder in and blended well.  Finally I folded the last two ingredients in.  I scooped heaping teaspoons full of dough on the cookie sheet, patting into smooth mounds and baked for 15 minutes.  Cooled the cookies for 30 minutes on the cookie sheet.  I got 20 cookies in total.  These cookies don't spread so they all fit on one big cookie sheet. 

If you like a more Almond-y flavor add more extract, Elana used a whole tablespoon. That seemed too much to me as I wanted to taste the chocolate, also.

I hope everyone is having a good day!

Judy

4 comments:

Leigh said...

I've only purchased almond milk, which I adore. With goats, however, it doesn't make sense to buy it anymore. We do have an almond tree which should be getting big enough to come into good production, so I may have to give making my own a try. Great ideas for the pulp!

Judy said...

The added ingredients of the nut, soy, and rice milks turned me away. I know they are trying to duplicate the mouth feel of cows milk, however I don't want to consume stuff I can't pronounce if I don't have to.

There is some debate on whether or not to skin your almonds before making your milk. I don't, but I do soak them overnight in the fridge to help break down the tannins and to soften them up as the raw almonds we buy are pasteurized and somewhat dehydrated.

Having goats does make a difference. I haven't done enough research to know how much casein protein is in goat milk so I haven't bought any.

Thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment!

tracie c. said...

i have a friend with celiac i will pass this on to her!

Judy said...

Glad I could help, there are a lot of good web sites on the web to pick up recipes. I like Elana's a lot because she doesn't use the gums to mimic the gluten in her recipes. I sub honey for the agave and yacon syrups she uses and haven't had any problems.

Thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment.