Almond info

A lit­tle back­ground on Almonds & Almond-​​Milk

Image: m_​bartosch /​ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

When my Mom was a kid, she would go with her broth­ers and sis­ters to the local mar­ket in her home­town of Fez, Morocco, where they would buy a creamy sweet bev­er­age, Assir Louz -  Juice of Almonds. She recalled this with nos­tal­gia the first time I told her of my new daily habit of mak­ing almond milk. She couldn’t recall exactly how this bev­er­age was made, but accord­ing to the tra­di­tional way almonds are treated in North Africa, and as a mat­ter of fact, in most parts of the world where almonds are still made in to a bev­er­age, the recipe prob­a­bly involved cook­ing & addi­tion of sugar. We do have to give the Assir Louz-​​makers some credit as hard-​​workers, as they didn’t have any elec­tri­cal appli­ances such as a two-​​horse motor blender, and had to extract the almonds’  fla­vor by crush­ing them in a mor­tar.       

The walk­ing anthol­ogy of nutri­tional and gen­eral knowl­edge, also known as David Wolfe, rec­om­mends two nuts to be favored amongst all : almonds and brazil-​​nuts. The lat­ter are one of the sole sources of the super antiox­i­dant & anti-​​carcinogen  sele­nium, and the for­mer have the best ratio of protein-​​to-​​fat (1–2.3), similar to that of seeds like sun­flower, sesame and pump­kin. And that is what an almond actu­ally is : the seed of the almond fruit, like the seed of its cousins the apri­cot, peach, cherry & plum. That seed evolves, phys­i­cally, from the female repro­duc­tive organs (the ovaries) of the fine almond flower, pro­vid­ing the botan­i­cal ground for the belief that almonds pro­mote fer­til­ity. Oh, and their ges­ta­tion time is almost that of humans, 7–8 months between fecun­da­tion of the flower to ripen­ing of the fruit.

Almonds are truly a gift pro­vided to human­ity by the sup­pos­edly ran­dom­ness of genet­ics :  some 5,000 years ago, the wild bit­ter almond, which con­tains a deadly cyanide-​​precursor, under­went a muta­tion that made this sub­stance – amyg­dalin – to dis­ap­pear, giv­ing birth to a new plant : the sweet almond, Amyg­dalus dul­cis. Now, dig this : not only that it could be safely eaten, it lent itself to the most nat­ural way of plant prop­a­ga­tion – from seed to tree, as opposed to other nut-​​trees, which need to be grafted to suc­ceed and could be domes­ti­cated only after this tech­nique was devel­oped much later – around 4,000 years ago.     

Sweet almonds began their com­mon life with humans in the Lev­ant, one of human­i­ties cra­dles, and started trav­el­ing around the Mediter­ranean sea where the cli­mate suited it the most. It even­tu­ally reached the New World with the Span­ish mis­sions, and found its way to Cal­i­for­nia. This is where the major­ity of almonds are pro­duced now (80% of global pro­duc­tion).