The Nut Butter Trick You Need For No-Soak Milk

For lactose intolerant folks and dairy haters, finding a plant-based milk you enjoy is important but not always easy. The frustration of finding a suitable brand may lead you to try making your own milk at home. Perhaps you simply like the fresh taste or have high standards about what exactly goes into your recipe. Wherever you may fall, the process can be a little tedious. If you're aboard the homemade nut milk train, we've found a trick that'll make things a little easier: Use nut butter to make no-soak milk.

Making the milk itself isn't hard, but waiting for your nuts to soak overnight before even starting to create a vanilla almond milk recipe is an exercise in patience. Bypass the painstaking process and simply use nut butter to make your milk. You can add a jar of any nut butter to the blender with some water and get milk within one minute. Some recipes call for about 1 tablespoon of nut butter per cup of water, so the milk may not taste as strong as homemade milk from nuts. However, you can always add more nut butter and bulk up the flavor with sweeteners like brown sugar, honey, and dates. Drink the milk right away or store it in the fridge for 10 days.

Almond butter is one of the more popular nut butters, so finding a jar shouldn't be a problem. One of the harder parts about making almond milk from scratch is dealing with the skins, since peeling them is the key to a smoother consistency. With processed nut butter, you don't have to worry about that step. The milk comes out creamy, with the earthy flavor of nut butter.

Cashew milk is another delicious option for making homemade milk. Although cashew milk isn't as prevalent, the butter can easily be used to make a batch of creamy milk in no time. With cashews naturally having a buttery texture, this milk is on the richer side. Macadamia butter is also on the creamy side, but the nuts have a mildly sweet, vanilla flavoring to them so they don't require any sweeteners. Thanks to its thick texture, macadamia milk has a similar richness to cow's milk, unlike its fellow keto-friendly milk alternatives.

If you don't have access to a blender, you can still easily use nut butters to make milk. Add the nut butter to a pot of boiling water and simmer it until it's well combined, stirring occasionally. Use a cheesecloth to strain the mixture once it's cooled down and store it in the fridge in an airtight container.