Post #336214 by The Gnomon on Wed, Oct 3, 2007 9:30 AM

On 2007-10-02 15:50, Scottes wrote:
Alas, doing it this way means one could end up with 800ml of orgeat, or 700ml. Being a little OCD this is wrong. I want to perfectly fill a 750ml bottle. Call me crazy...

Whereas I don't care how much I end up with as long as it is exactly plenty. As for being OCD, I'm not positive, but isn't that an impossibility in the world of tiki where obsession and cumpulsion is practically a requirement, not a disorder?

Concerning the drying... If the almonds are too moist they end up clumping in my little food processor, so I wanted them dry so they chop better. But if they're too dry the food processor creates to much almond powder which doesn't filter out easily. Now that I think about it, patting with paper towels is probably fine, and fast.

Whenever you rinse them off from the store the milking process has begun. You don't want to stop that, you just want to get the excess tap water off of them before soaking in the purified water. This you do while the milking process is begining, so you only lose a very little of the milk. That's why you can only afford to rinse them for up to 30 minutes. After that the milking process is in full flow.

You don't want to abort the milking process once it's started. I think you'll get a lot less quality to the milk. Once the milk starts flowing you don't want to do anything that will slow that down one bit. Drying them out more than slows the process it brings it to a complete stop.

The moist nuggetrines clump up in my little Magic Bullet as well. You have to do lots of small amounts rather than try to do them all at once. Use just enough almonds so that they're done by the time they start to clump. That's the most efficient/fastest way I've found with the equipment I have.

I haven't tried this because of the $1500 price tag (expensive experiment), but I thought probably the best way to get the most milk out of the almonds would be to get a nut grinder like the one in these pics to make fresh almond butter.

Then put the almond butter in a blender with the water and let it blend on slow for an optimum period of time (yet to be determined). Because the almond particles would all be so small as to form butter, the overnight wait for the milk would not be necessary. It would take very little time for the emulsion to reach its peak, I would think. You might want to see if you can make almond butter using your food processor.

Of course, the nylon bags you found might not have a fine enough mesh to hold the ultra fine almond particles, so heavy-duty cheesecloth might be required.

BTW, here's the link to that cheesecloth supplier I was talking about (The Rag Lady).

Potential flaw in this method. We know that the finer we chop the almonds the more almond surfaces there are to be exposed to the water. The more almond surfaces that are exposed to the water, the more efficient the mash is in producing milk. What we don't know is whether or not there is a limit to which the almonds can be chopped and still be capable of making milk. I'm guessing that there isn't, but I'm not prepared to make it a $1500 guess. :)

It is quite possible that when the almonds have been ground down to the point that they become nut butter that the oils needed to interact with the water to create the emulsion (milk) might be exposed to other chemicals from the almond that would prohibit the emulsion from taking place. Once again, I highly doubt it. I think that the fresh almond butter will just allow the almond oils to come in contact with the water much faster and in greater quantity than the methods we are using.

Some people's food processors are supposedly capable of making peanut butter, so if yours is one, maybe you could conduct the experiment. If it works like a charm, we might be making real orgeat at record speed with minimal mess and effort.

When will I learn to check my spelling?
Never

[ Edited by: The Gnomon 2007-10-03 09:31 ]