Nut milk is just a name. It's called milk because it is a beverage made from nuts that has the colour, texture and consistency of milk and can be used as a substitute for milk. All nut milk is, is raw nuts (usually almonds or cashews) soaked in water for about 12 hours which activates/sprouts them, then they're ground up in a blender and passed through a mesh filter to remove the pulp. A small amount of sugar and/or vanilla or other flavourings can be optionally added.

Nut milks (and coconut) are becoming increasingly popular because they taste great and they have a very long pre-open shelf life of about 6-10 weeks depending on how new the product is at the grocery store. Once opened it should be used in 7 days but it can last a lot longer than that in my experience. So it essentially never turns sour nor goes bad.

Cashew milk is the closest in taste to cows milk and thus the closest substitute for cooking/baking. Almond and coconut milk have a slight taste of almond or coconut to them and of course are best used where that is desired/enjoyable (ie: not in an omelette hehe).

All of them are fantastic on cereal, in coffee, smoothies, etc. They also sell chocolate almond milk which is great too.

What got me into it, was I kept hearing about it in smoothie recipes and other places online and I thought it sounded gross, but one day I was in the grocery store and saw it there on sale, so I grabbed a carton of chocolate almond milk and regular to try it out. I enjoyed the taste of it so much that I kept buying it, plus it never goes bad like cows milk and I used to throw a lot of that out from going sour. So after about a month or two I ended up just not buying cow's milk any more as I found the almond/coconut/cashew milk to be superior and have many more uses in the kitchen.

There are other milk alternatives too like soy milk, rice milk and others but I tried rice milk and it is surprisingly more expensive and it is chalky tasting and yucky. Soy milk tastes ok but I'm not fond of soy products so I avoid it.

Almond/cashew/coconut milk is awesome. :) Best part is I can make it myself too, cashew milk is the easiest and doesn't need to be soaked first, so I can just buy a big bag of cashews and keep them in the freezer, take 1 cup of cashews out, throw 3-4 cups of water in the blender with it, blend the crap out of it and unlike almonds - it doesn't need to be filtered. Fresh cashew milk ready to go. Compare that to raising a cow in my backyard or closet or something and well... I'll take cashews and almonds any day. So much easier and tastier. :)


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almond_milk