How to make your own Roasted Hazelnut Milk - A Step by Step Guide

step by step making roasted hazelnut milk

You might be wondering why adding this extra step of roasting the hazelnuts before making your own nut milk is worth your time. Well, let me give you two good reasons.

 1) roasted tastes so much better and if you add cocoa and maybe a hint of melted nougat you´ll have a vegan homemade Nutella milk and as if you needed more...
 2) roasting hazelnuts helps remove the brown skin around the nuts. This skin is responsible for any bitter taste in the nut milk.

So, now you see why these additional 5 minutes of work are really worth it.

This is what you need:
200 grams of shelled Hazelnuts
4 cups of water + a little extra to soak nuts









Pour your 200 grams of Hazelnuts into your frying pan NO! additional oil. This works fine in my cast iron pan. I have not so good experiences with my ceramic pan!

raw hazelnuts 

Turn the stove on high and keep stirring as they will burn otherwise. Once the smell of roasted nuts has filled your kitchen and the brown skins come off, you can turn the stove off again. This will only take 2-3 minutes at most. Take the pan of the hob and keep stirring ( a normal pan that can´t hold the heat like a cast iron one, you might need to leave on the hob for another minute or two) While you stir the brown skins will start to come off. Enjoy the smell, you are an important step closer to making your own nut milk

roasted hazelnuts with the skins starting to come off

Next, pour your toasted nuts into a sieve and keep rubbing them with a spoon against the mesh to get the remaining skins off.

roasted hazelnuts in sieve 

The very stubborn ones you can rub between your hands and fingers. At this point the roasted nuts should have cooled down enough that you don´t get burned. But be careful anyway.  Thanks to the oils in the nuts your hands will feel really smooth! And don't worry about the discolouration on your skin, it is nothing a bit of soap and water won't fix!

Now, put the nuts into a little bowl, cover the hazelnuts with water and leave them soaking in a covered bowl in your fridge for 12-24h.

soaking hazelnuts

Next morning drain the water off them,
rinse the soaked nuts in sieve under warm water
and then put them in your food processor or smoothy maker,
and add 4 cups of water.

After making sure you closed that lid properly you turn on your machine and let it pulse for a good 10 minutes. You need to do this, for this long to release the oils within the nuts into your milk.
Hazelnuts are very rich in vitamins E, but it is bound in the oils. So if you want to get all the goodness into your milk you need the oils!

I used to make a lot of various nut milks with my Kenwood. The manual said not to let the Kenwood  run longer than a minute at a time in pulse mode, so I did 10 one minute cycles with a 1 minute cooling down pause for my Diva. And you could still get this hot motor smell. I now have a food processor that is better set up for this job and it only needs half the speed setting and still gets a nicer result... What I am trying to say is, you might have to play around a little to figure out what works best with your machine. And make sure not to overheat the motor if it is an elderly machinery or a Kenwood ...

Now for the next step, Pinterest is full of tips and tricks to make your life easier. Let me warn you the one with the french press does NOT work! At least not with my bodum. Maybe the good ones have a mesh that is too fine? The nut pulp plugged the mesh and I couldn't get down more than 1 cm. More force and I would have feared to break my french press.

So here is what I do. I take a burp cloth (I use them instead of cheese cloth as they are washable and reusable) line a jug with the burp cloth and pour the content of your pulsed water hazelnut mix into it.

getting ready to drain the hazelnut milk in a reused burp cloth 

 Get a rubber band and hang it up and drain all the yumminess out of the mix.

draining construction for roasted hazelnut milk

roasted hazelnut milk

Now fill your roasted hazelnut milk into a clean bottle and refrigerate. It will last for about 4-5 days.


You can now scrape the nut meal in your cloth gently into a freezer bag and freeze it. It works great as substitute for nut flour. I collect it until I have enough nut flour to make the most delicious brownies (recipe to follow!)

This is the only nut milk I can drink straight from the bottle. But I also love using it in Smoothies, baking (Hazelnut Carrot Bread) or in my coffee.

Enjoy!