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Almond Sesame Date Milk

A dairy-free nut milk — soaked almonds and toasted til blended with dates and cardamom, then strained through muslin.

Drafted — not yet cooked in our kitchen

A bottle and glass of cream-coloured nut milk beside a muslin cloth and a bowl of almonds
Hands on
11 min
Total
8 hr 26 min
Serves
3
Difficulty
easy

A nut milk with sesame in it, which is what stops it tasting thin. Dates do the sweetening, so how sweet it comes out depends entirely on which dates you have — taste before you decide whether to add a fifth.

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Ingredients

Serves
3

Tap what you already have.

Method

  1. Cover the almonds with plenty of cold water and leave them overnight. They take up a lot, so give them at least twice their volume.

    Look for: An almond snapped in half is white and slightly springy rather than glassy, and the skin peels off cleanly. The soaking water will have gone brown — throw it away.

    480–600 min · bowl

  2. In a separate small bowl, soak the dates in hot water. Pull the stones out if they are still in.

    Look for: Soft enough to squash flat between two fingers with no fibrous core.

    15–20 min · bowl

  3. Toast the sesame on a dry tawa over low heat, keeping them moving. They are small and they burn between one look and the next.

    Look for: They start hopping in the pan and turn one shade darker, with a nutty smell. Tip them out at that point — the pan alone will take them past it.

    2–3 min · low heat · tawa

  4. Peel the almonds, then blend them with the sesame, dates, cardamom seeds, salt and 300 ml of the water. Run it long — a nut milk is only as smooth as this stage.

    Look for: An opaque, thick white liquid with no visible pieces of almond skin or date left, and no rattle from the jar.

    3–4 min · mixer-grinder

  5. Add the remaining water and blend again briefly, then pour the lot through a doubled muslin cloth set over a bowl. Gather the cloth and wring it hard — a good half of the milk is still in the pulp when it stops dripping on its own.

    Look for: The pulp left in the cloth is a dryish ball that holds its shape, and the strained milk is smooth and cream-coloured with no grit at the bottom of the bowl.

    5–7 min

  6. Drink cold, or warm it gently in a pan — do not boil it, it separates. It keeps two or three days in the fridge in a covered bottle and settles while it stands, so shake before pouring.

    Look for: Evenly opaque after shaking, with no sediment left stuck to the bottom of the bottle.

    1–2 min

About this dish

Almond milk is not an Indian preparation, but every part of it here is: soaking and peeling badam is standard practice before they go into anything ground, til is a winter ingredient across the north and west, and dates carry the sweetness the way they do in a chikki. The leftover pulp is worth keeping — it goes into a paratha dough or a batter rather than the bin. For readers outside India: any fine-mesh nut milk bag works in place of the muslin, and white til is what is meant here, not black.

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