Nut Milk Without a Nut-Milk Bag: The Fine-Mesh Method

The short answer: you don’t need a nut-milk bag. Blend soaked nuts with water, pour through a fine 60-mesh strainer set over a bowl, and let it drain for two minutes before a final gentle stir. You’ll bottle smooth milk and skip the part where you hand-wring pulp through fabric at 7 a.m.

The trouble with bags

Nut-milk bags work, but they’re a chore: squeezing is messy, the fabric stains and holds smells, and drying one over the tap takes a day. Most end up in the back of a drawer after the third use.

The 60-mesh method

1. Soak one cup of almonds or cashews overnight; drain. 2. Blend with four cups of fresh water for about a minute. 3. Set the 60-mesh cup over a wide bowl – a fine mesh with ~0.25 mm openings catches the pulp while the milk streams through. 4. Pour in stages and give the pulp a slow stir with a spoon; don’t press hard. 5. Bottle, refrigerate, shake before use. Keeps about four days.

What about the last bit of texture?

Cashew milk comes through the 60 mesh essentially smooth. Almond milk retains a whisper of body that most people never notice in coffee or oats – if you want it silkier, strain a second time. The pulp, meanwhile, is ready for oatmeal, energy balls or crackers.

Same tool, whole kitchen

The 60-mesh cup that strains your nut milk also sifts flour and dusts cocoa; swap to the 20 for rinsing the nuts before soaking. One solid stainless handle, three cups, no weld between handle and cup. Answers on the FAQ page – and the launch list gets 15% off during Amazon launch week.

How to Strain Stock Crystal Clear at Home

The short answer: strain twice. First pass through a coarse or medium mesh to remove bones and vegetables, second pass through a fine 60 mesh – slowly, without pressing the solids. Pressing squeezes cloudy particles through; gravity alone gives you the clear, glossy stock restaurants serve.

Why stock turns cloudy

Cloudiness is suspended protein and emulsified fat, whipped into the liquid by a rolling boil. Two habits prevent most of it: keep the pot at a bare simmer, and skim the foam in the first twenty minutes. The rest is a straining problem.

The two-pass method

Pass one: ladle – don’t pour – the stock through a 20 or 40 mesh strainer into a clean container. Ladling disturbs the sediment at the bottom far less than tipping the whole pot. Discard the solids without pressing them. Pass two: swap to a 60-mesh cup and let the stock fall through at its own pace. The fine net catches the particles that make broth murky.

No cheesecloth required

Classic recipes call for cheesecloth, which is single-use, slippery and always missing when you need it. A 60-mesh screen (openings around 0.25 mm) catches what cheesecloth catches for everyday stock, rinses clean in seconds, and goes in the dishwasher.

One tool for both passes

With COLAROA you do pass one with the 20 or 40 mesh cup, flex the frame, click in the 60 for pass two – same solid 304 stainless handle, no weld at the joint to loosen over years of hot stock. More on the FAQ page. Launching on Amazon soon – the launch list gets 15% off during launch week.

How to Rinse Quinoa and Rice So Nothing Slips Through

The short answer: use a coarse 20-mesh strainer, rinse under cold running water while stirring with your fingers, and stop when the water runs clear – about 30 seconds for rice, a full minute for quinoa. The coarse mesh lets the starchy water escape fast while holding every grain.

Why rinsing matters

Quinoa is coated in saponin, a natural compound that tastes bitter and soapy if it isn’t rinsed away. Rice carries loose surface starch that turns a fluffy pot gluey. Thirty seconds at the sink fixes both – if your strainer cooperates.

Why the bowl-and-swirl method fails

Swirling grain in a bowl of water and pouring it off works until the last pour, when a spoonful of quinoa rides the water into the drain. And a colander with big holes is worse – quinoa grains are about 2 mm and slip straight through. A 20-mesh cup (openings near 0.9 mm) is the sweet spot: fast drainage, zero escapees.

Step by step

1. Fit the coarse 20-mesh cup. 2. Add up to two cups of grain. 3. Run cold water through while raking gently with your fingertips. 4. Watch the water below – cloudy means keep going, clear means done. 5. Tap the cup rim once on the sink edge and the grain releases in one clean mass.

One handle, three jobs

The same COLAROA handle takes a 40-mesh cup for straining tea or stock and a 60-mesh cup for sifting flour or making nut milk – three tools in one drawer slot, with no weld between handle and cup to snap. Details on the FAQ page; 15% launch-week discount for everyone on the launch list.

Why Strainer Handles Break (It’s Almost Always the Weld)

The short answer: nearly every kitchen strainer is built the same way – a wire handle spot-welded to the rim of the mesh bowl. Heat, water, detergent and a few hundred lifting cycles slowly fatigue those two tiny weld points until one day the bowl simply drops off the handle, usually over a pot of boiling pasta.

Read the one-star reviews

Open the reviews of any bestselling strainer and sort by lowest rating. The same story repeats: “handle snapped off”, “bowl separated after two months”, “weld broke the first time I drained potatoes.” It isn’t bad luck – it’s the design. A spot weld is a tiny bridge of melted metal, and every hot-cold cycle in the dishwasher expands and shrinks it a little differently than the steel around it. Metal fatigue does the rest.

Why welds fail in the kitchen

Three stresses gang up on that joint: leverage (a full strainer multiplies force at the rim), thermal shock (boiling water then cold rinse), and corrosion (weld spots are the least protected part of stainless steel). Any one of them is manageable. All three, daily, is why the handle joint is almost always the first thing to fail.

The fix: remove the weld from the equation

You can’t make a spot weld immortal – but you can design the joint out entirely. COLAROA’s mesh cup is never welded to the handle. The cup spring-fits into a solid 3 mm 304 stainless wire frame: press it in to seat it, flex the frame slightly to release it. The joint that breaks on ordinary strainers simply does not exist, and you get three mesh grades (20, 40, 60) on one handle as a bonus.

Curious how the swap works? It’s covered on the FAQ page. And if your current strainer is living on borrowed time, join the launch list – everyone on it gets 15% off during launch week on Amazon.

20 vs 40 vs 60 Mesh: What Each Strainer Size Actually Catches

The short answer: mesh numbers count the wires per inch. 20 mesh is coarse and holds back pasta, beans and berries while water rushes through. 40 mesh is the everyday middle ground for tea, juice and stock. 60 mesh is fine enough to sift flour, dust cocoa and strain nut milk. If you only remember one rule: the bigger the number, the finer the net.

What the numbers mean

A “20 mesh” screen has 20 wires per inch in each direction, leaving openings of roughly 0.9 mm. At 40 mesh the openings shrink to about 0.4 mm, and at 60 mesh to about 0.25 mm – smaller than a grain of table salt. That’s why the same tool behaves so differently depending on the cup you fit.

Quick reference table

Why one size never fits all

Use a fine mesh for rice and it clogs with starch; use a coarse mesh for cocoa and everything falls straight through. That mismatch is why kitchens end up with a drawer full of single-purpose strainers. A three-cup system – one handle, cups in 20, 40 and 60 mesh – covers the whole range in one drawer slot.

The COLAROA way

COLAROA is a 3-in-1 fine mesh strainer set: one solid 304 stainless steel handle and three swap-in mesh cups (20, 40, 60). The cup spring-fits into the handle frame – no weld between handle and cup, so the joint that snaps on ordinary strainers doesn’t exist. More answers on our FAQ page, and if you want 15% off when we launch on Amazon, join the launch list.