How To: Almond Flour

Today is going to be a rough day. And I mean extraordinarily rough. I got about 30 minutes of sleep (this is an optimistic guesstimate) somewhere around the 3:15-3:45 a.m. time frame. I just couldn't fall asleep and I was woke up at 4:00 a.m. to drive CL to the airport. Yet another friend is moving out of the state, though he's taking it one step further and leaving the country for "America's Top Hat", more commonly known as Canada. (I love Canada and Canadians, and I apologize if I offend anyone with the top hat joke.) Anyways, onto the real topic for today...

Almond Flour

Almond flour (meal) is seriously just ground almonds. In general almond flour uses almonds that have been blanched, meaning the skin has been removed. Almond meal can use blanched or whole almonds. It resembles corn meal more so than wheat flour. Because of the natural oils in almonds, it's not great for foods such as bread that require real dough. Kneading almond flour dough just doesn't work.

Anyways, there are two methods of making almond flour: food processor or blender. I tried both and you can see the comparison below.

Top left: 1 cup of blanched and sliced almonds
Top right: Into the food processor
Bottom left: Results of the food processor
Bottom right: Into the blender

The results:

The blender definitely ground the almonds more finely and did it faster than the food processor could. I think this was because there was just so much space available for the sliced almonds to spins around in the processor without hitting the blades. I recommend using the blender for this and use a half cup or less of almonds at a time (depending on your blender size). Also, be careful not to blend too much or you'll make almond butter. Which is yummy, but maybe not quite what you were going for.