Patti's Place: How to Make Your Own Almond Flour/Meal

Pulp left after making almond milk

In yesterday's post, I gave you my recipe and method for making all natural, healthy almond milk at home. If you missed it, you can find it here:

How to Make Your Own Healthy Almond Milk at Home

Remember all that pulp you had left afterwards?

Today I'm going to show you what to do with it.

We're going to make our own almond flour, or meal as some call it.

It's really very simple, you just dehydrate it. That's it. I'll show you how I do it, step by step.

Step 1. Mix it together with your hands or a spoon to blend the finer with the coarse

Step 2. Spread it on your dehydrator trays. I have the round dehydrator with the hole in the middle so I don't try to use the parchment paper. If you have a dehydrator with trays, I would recommend using parchment paper to spread the pulp on.

Bottom tray

Step 3. Spread the pulp on as many trays as needed.

Five trays with pulp

Step 4. Dehydrate. Time of drying will vary according to the temperature of your dehydrator. Mine doesn't have a temperature setting. It takes about 12 hours for the pulp to dry in mine. I put it in another room because it's noisy and I just let it run all night.

Step 5. Remove dried pulp into large bowl. Again, if you're able to use parchment paper, this part will be much easier and not as messy. I place a large bowl in the sink because I always lose a bit of the dried pulp when dumping it in the bowl.

Dried and coarse almond pulp

Step 6. If you want a finer flour, you need to place it in your food processor or blender and process on high until the texture you want. You'll want to do this if you plan to use it for breads, etc.

You can buy blanched almond flour for a lighter color and a finer texture. The flour on the left is blanched and on the right is the homemade. The reason it's darker is because the almonds still had the brown outer coating on them when we made the milk.

Blanched on the left, homemade on the right.

I usually don't grind mine and this is the way it looks. I store it in a large freezer bag in the freezer until I need it. I use it as filler in meat loaf, meat balls and anything else you would need bread crumbs for. I even used some for dressing over the holidays and it was very good. If your flour is a bit too chunky, just rub it between your hands to make it as fine as you need without processing.