Homemade Almond Flour
You're probably wondering why I'm posting a recipe with almond flour on the site. Well, you'll know exactly why in a few days when you'll see the beautiful macarons you can make with it. Good almond flour is the key ingredient in the macarons recipe. Before you start, I recommend getting good almond flour, store-bought or homemade.
The need to make almond flour at home came from several reasons. Almond flour found in shops is quite expensive and there is a pretty good chance that it won't have the required quality. It might be rancid or coarsely ground, which is not recommended for macarons.
Most of the time I do as you see in the video. I peel and dry the almonds, then grind with a simple coffee grinder. Thus, from 500g of unpeeled raw almonds, I get 475g of fine and perfect almond flour. More recently, I found almonds already peeled at a reasonable price, and I can skip the drying, the peeling etc.
If you are serious about macarons, you should invest in a coffee grinder and you will always have almond flour at hand. I also used it to make the flour from unpeeled almonds. This also works, only you'll need peeled / blanched almonds or almond flakes for perfectly white macarons.
Stored in the refrigerator, it lasts for many days and won't go rancid. Use anytime you need.
Place the almonds in a deep bowl.
Pour over hot boiling water and leave for 4-5 minutes.
Drain the water and let cool for 10 minutes.
Take each almond and lightly press between your fingers. The skin comes off very quickly and easily.
If they don't clean well, pour over hot water again and leave for another 3-4 minutes.
Along the way, place the blanched almonds in an oven tray.
When you finish, tap with some napkins, the tray also - to dry as soon as possible.
Place in the preheated oven at 80 degrees C for 30 minutes.
During this time, mix 2-3 times with a spoon.
Remove from the oven, let cool completely, at least 5-6 hours, even.
Hot almonds are kind of soft, so the flour won't be fine enough.
My super tool for grinding almonds is this Bosch coffee grinder. It had a reasonable price and holds up well. I don't even know how many kg of almonds and powdered sugar it made ... so it's great :)
I tried to make flour with other food processors and blenders, they did chop, but they did not grind finely, and this is what we need.
Put about a handful of almonds in the grinder.
Grind well, but don't insist too much, we don't want to make butter.
Place the flour in a sieve.
And sift carefully, using a spoon to help you - almond flour tends to stick to the sides.
Place the bigger grains that remain after sifting back in the grinder and grind a little more.
This way, we'll get the perfect flour, fine and sifted.
Now you can store the flour in a bag and keep in the fridge until you need it.
Like any nut, it tends go to rancid, so keep in a cool place.
