Almond flour is...
just ground up almonds. Same with any nut, fine ground peanuts = peanut flour, fine ground macadamias = macadamia flour. Nut flour is just ground up nuts. It is also called almond meal. If you want to get technical, almond meal is just ground almonds and almond flour is made after extracting the oil. You can make it or just buy it. It'll work if you make it yourself in a blender or coffee mill. I use a blender and it come out great and works great in all my baked goods. Problem is it's a big pain in the you-know-what. If you can afford a little extra money on food products I'd recommend buying, it'll save you a lot of time and mess. Almond flour leaves baked goods with a more traditional taste than other nuts making it ideal for baking. Almond flour is a low carb flour.
Buy nut flour or make it yourself
Blanched almond flour is best for baking: it's much finer and softer than almond meal.
It's messy and a pain in the butt but if you're patient and have extra time on your hands, you can make nut flour. You just grind up about 1/2 cup of nuts at a time until fine but before it turns into butter. If you want it finer, sift it through a strainer. A pound of nuts yeilds 4 1/2 cups of sifted nut flour. I put just enough almonds in the blender to just barely cover the blades then put on the grind setting and stop it when the flour stops swirling. Then I pour out the flour on top into a bowl and dig the bottom stuff out with a butter knife into a strainer and then rub it through with my fingers until I get nothing but grainy bits and put that in a cup then pour the top flour back into the blender and blend again ( this may not be necessary but I feel like I'm getting it finer and getting more out of it this way) then put it through the sifter and repeat with the rest of the nuts. This takes me about an hour to process 1 pound of nuts. I save the skins and grainy bits that get sifted out and eat it as a snack-it's great mixed in sugar free yogurt or butter, cinnamon and splenda or butter and sugar free maple syrup, use your imagination! Click here to get almond flour!
The many uses of almond flour
It can be used in many baking applications and it works very well for cakes, cookies, brownies and more. When making things like pizza dough, bread and pasta, you need gluten flour if you want to get the traditional texture. I've made many things from almond flour including cake, cookies, pancakes, brownies, muffins, crackers and pizza crust (different from regular but still good) with great results.
Almond Nutrition
Almond flour is an excellent substitute for regular flour. It's all natural, loaded with nutrients, in particular, vitamin E and magnesium and it's low in carbohydrates (about 24 net carbs per cup for fine-ground and blanched as opposed to 92 per cup of wheat flour), making a very good choice for low carb flour. Almonds are one of the most nutritious nuts and have the most magnesium. Click here to get almond flour.
Suggestion to use with nut flour in recipes
ThickenThin Not/Sugar. Used to add thickness in recipes. It's a mixture of vegetable gums, is low in calories and all the carbohydrates and calories come from fiber.
Erythritol or xylitol. These are bulk sugar substitutes which cause little or no rise in insulin and are lower calorie than sugar.
