Making Almond Flour

I can’t find a lot of keto friendly ingredients here, like stevia and other natural sweeteners, almond flour, coconut flour and several others. But I learned that almond flour is nothing more than ground-up almonds! It’s a necessary staple for any low carb baking. Yay! So I got some almonds and started right in. It sounds pretty easy.

Well silly me. Making almond flour is incredibly labor-intensive! First you have to blanch & peel the almonds. Sounds easy…pour boiling water over the almonds, wait exactly one minute and no longer, drain and cool with cold water. Drain again & pat dry and those pesky skins will squirt right off with a little squeeze. In fact the directions had the audacity to suggest using both hands because you might lose control of the almonds as they shoot out of your grasp! Uh huh. Some of them I had to blanch three times before the darn skins would come off, with hard rubbing! They sure weren’t flying around the room. Then I spread them in a baking pan and let them air dry, and later put them in a warm oven for awhile.

The next morning I started grinding them in my cheapie new blender. The instructions say to use a food processor but I don’t have one. You have to be careful not to overdo it or you get almond butter instead of flour. Well I got a teeny bit of flour with a lot of almond pieces on top that wouldn’t grind. So now the task is to send all that stuff through a fine strainer to sort out the flour and have another go with the blender. My first attempt netted me about a cup of stuff that needs regrinding and two tablespoons of flour. As friend Gail says, enough flour to make one silver dollar size pancake. Aaaaggghhhhh!! This could take weeks!

I spent all day off & on grinding, sifting and regrinding almonds. I’ve perfected my technique….now while grinding I shake the blender so it will incorporate more of those bigger pieces, or so I imagine. I’m up to about 1/3 cup of flour after at least ten grindings and siftings!

And the sad thing is, I’m only working with half of the almonds I blanched & peeled. I’ve got way more work ahead of me. I’m sitting here wondering what recipe could possibly be stupendously delicious enough to rate using this more-precious-than-gold flour?