Nutrition content of homemade hemp milk?

[Jonne]

Aloha vegan friends! I'm a recently converted vegan (4-5 months) and have been raw for the past few weeks. I've just started making hemp milk which is delicious, sterilized here in the us of a unfortunatly. I'm making up a specific diet plan right now for strength training so I'm adding up my daily cals/carbs/etc. The hemp seeds are my main source of protein and I would like to start consuming most of them in the form of milk instead of chewing them from now on. So I need to know what the nutritional content of the milk is. Say I make a batch from 1lb of seeds, thats...

2432 Cals
167 g protein
106 g carbs
136 g fat

Any ideas or info on how to test how much of that will be in the milk? I've looked at the value of store bought hemp milk and the protein content is quite low. Thanks for any and all help! :cool:

[harpy]

Hello there. I don't know the answer but can't you just work out how many "portions" (whatever you regard as a portion) of milk you will get out of 1lb of seeds and then just divide the figures you've given by the number of portions? I guess the answer depends on portion size and how much water you add, but I wouldn't have thought the ratios between the different nutrients could alter when you add water?

Or am I missing something? :o

[Jonne]

Hi, thanks for the reply. Well I could figure out the content that way but when you strain the milk after blending theres a large clump of seeds leftover in the strainer bag.. I should have mentioned that part. I believe the inside "hearts" are chopped up pretty fine and most make it into the milk unlike the hulls. So the fiber is mostly lost, but I dont know if the process is 100% efficient for the hearts either. It just doesn't seem like I would be consuming the same amount of nutrition as opposed to eating them whole, the difference is what I'm looking for.

[harpy]

Oh, I see! Silly me. Would the nutritional values be much different from the commercial milks then? I guess that's the $64k question.

I suppose you couldn't use the pulp to make burgers or something, like they do with soy milk residues I believe? That way you wouldn't lose any of the nutritional value - but perhaps you don't need all that fibre?

[CoolCat]

Sadly a lot of okara (the pulp left after making soy milk) is used as animal feed. So our soy milk has a dark side :(

[Allysia]

I always thought that all of the nutrients, minus the fiber, would be in the milk, but I could be wrong. I'm interested in an answer to this as well!

[CoolCat]

If it was fiber without nutriants it wouldn't be suitable for animal feed, unless they use it as a filler and enrich it with minerals, vitamins, amino acids,... but that would probably be more expensive than just grown more soy or corn especially for feed. So not a very scientific answer but I think the production process can't get everything out. Commercial milk can probably make a finer pulp than we can at home, so they would get more out of the beans than we can.