Enjoy the fresh and healthful addition of nuts and seeds in place of traditional flours to mix things up and broaden your nutritional horizons.
Meals, or flours, can be made a few different ways from nuts and seeds.
Instant Nut Meals & Flours
For this method, you generally want to use hard nuts (such as brazil nuts or almonds). Place your nuts in a food processor and process until finely ground. Keep an eye on your mixture to make sure you don’t overly process it.
If you over process it, the oils in the nuts will start to release. If this happens, you don’t have to toss it. You can let it keep going to make delicious nut butter! Simply keep it going, scraping as needed, until you reach your desired consistency. Add a pinch of salt and a little sweetener and process just to combine. (Be warned. This may take a while!)
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Fine Nut Flour
I have also used dehydrated nut pulp left from making nut milk. To do this, place your completely dried nut pulp into the blender. You will have to process in small batches. Only pour in enough to cover the blades of your blender. Run blender long enough to finely grind your flour. Sift into a bowl using a fine mesh strainer. These can be used in raw and baked goods. Sounds like a sweet deal to me!
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Seed Meals
Most commonly used for this are flax or chia seeds. You may buy these already ground into a meal but prolonged storage can diminish nutrients and encourage oils to go rancid. For best results, I like to grind flax and chia seeds immediately prior to using them. The seeds are too small to be ground well in a food processor so to do this, you will want a mini blender, preferably with a grinding blade. I usually process no more than 1/3 to 1/2 cup of nuts or seeds in this at a time so as to yield a finer consistency. Processing too many at a time can prohibit rotation of the seeds leaving some unground and some overly ground and tacky.
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Voila! There you have it! Now stop wasting money and nutrients on all that pre-ground stuff, will ya?!
On another note, if you plan on using large amounts of homemade flours and are looking to save time in getting a superior quality, Vitamix offers a dry container with some models, which can be used for flours or nut butters. This blender is an investment but, I will tell you, I LOVE IT!
