HEALTHY, EASY AND OATS SO GOOD

The alternative to dairy that’s cheap and easy to make at home

SOME TIME between refusing to take the cartons of milk at primary school lunch and sipping on dairy-rich, boozy beverages, I developed a lactose aversion. It’s not an intolerance – some products are okay, others require minor medication – but it has proved to be an annoyance. Plant-based milks offer a happy alternative for most occasions. (And you don’t need me to tell you that plenty of other people are turning to alternative milks to get their creamy liquid fix.)

Like any annoying food media person, I generally prefer to make a food item rather than buy it. But like many apartment dwelling, debt-owing millennia ls, I don’t have the room or money for a powerful blender (read: Vitamix) that would make DIY nut milk a breeze. Plus, nuts are expensive. Oats, on the other hand, are cheap – and, as we learned from peas, you can make milk out of basically anything.

“It checks a lot of boxes,” says Gregory Zamfotis, the founder of the New York-based coffee chain Gregorys Coffee, noting that it is dairy-, nut- and gluten-free, and vegan. “It’s free of everything.”

At home, you can make decent oat milk with little effort and a non-powerful blender. Yes, I said decent. I’m not here to promise a homemade oat milk that compares to storebought or something from a cow. But with one cup of rolled oats and plenty of filtered water, you can make an inexpensive and tasty product to use in your coffee, baked goods and savoury dishes.

Browsing through the top internet results for oat milk recipes and consulting with an oat milk-making co-worker led me down several paths: Should I soak my oats? For how long? Do I add salt, a sweetener? What is the least messy way to strain the finished product? What do I do with the leftover pulp?

First, the soaking: I prefer the flavour and viscosity that results from a 30-minute soak in filtered water. (Filtered is important – you don’t want chlorine or any other off flavours in there.) More than 30 minutes yielded a slimy milk reminiscent of mucus. No soaking at all made for a watery, thin beverage with a mouth-feel similar to skim milk. (Fine, but boring.)

Another way to improve the texture: rinse the oats after they’ve soaked. Blending time matters, too; most recipes say to blend for a minute or two, but I found that a mere 10 seconds did the trick.

Straining was initially extremely tedious because I used a paper towel-lined sieve (my usual way to strain things; see above about being a thrifty millennial). After making a mess and muttering about how milking a cow is surely easier (I grew up on a farm, so

I’m allowed to make this joke), I conceded that this was a deal-breaker and moved on to cheesecloth from the office test kitchen.

Better, but still finicky – I had to scrape a spoon along the bottom to help the liquid pass through the cloth, which inevitably made a bit of a mess. At last, I gave in and ordered a nut milk bag. I cannot stress enough how easy the nut milk bag (made of food-grade nylon) makes this whole process – you can easily squeeze out most of the liquid with no danger of particles passing through. Even better, it’s reusable.

As for the leftover pulp: I’ve been mixing it into cookie dough and muffin batters; pancakes are next on the agenda. It also makes a nice gloopy face mask with the addition of honey and melted coconut oil.

Now I have a basic, oat-flavoured, creamy liquid that I put in smoothies, baked goods, sauces and overnight oats. Heating the oat milk causes it to thicken, which isn’t bad in, say, a vegan mac and cheese sauce, but can be unexpected in something such as chai. It’s also fun to experiment with flavours: I made a chocolate-espresso version that’s delightful straight and a cardamom-ginger that will be fantastic in iced coffee.

Is this homemade oat milk as good as store-bought? No. But it’s almost as good, and the value of making your own is hard to argue against: A half-gallon carton of my favourite brand is around $5 (R69); a 1kg canister of rolled oats (yielding about 12 cups) is generally around $4, meaning I can make about twoand-a-half gallons of oat milk per canister. The price goes down when I buy oats in bulk.

With a price difference like that – and the power to make it from a few pantry ingredients – I’m sold. And once you’ve tried making your own oat milk, you just might be, too. | The Washington Post