Our homemade oat milk experiment

Last spring, I did a little digging into the question of how plant-based milk alternatives stack up to dairy milk. This turned out to be a thornier issue than it seems; almond milk, the most popular alternative, has a much smaller carbon footprint than cow's milk, but it also uses much more water to produce, and the other plant milks all have various downsides in terms of health, taste, and affordability.

A week or so ago, however, I started thinking about this subject again, in the wake of the FDA's groundbreaking decision that producers of these plant-based milks will have to stop using the name
"milk" for their products because it's too confusing to consumers. (Apparently, even though "almond milk" has been known by that name since the Middle Ages, the people drinking it all these centuries have actually been doing so under the false impression that almonds have breasts.) I'd also been hearing a little more about the immense benefits of a vegan diet (as opposed to the sort of semi-vegetarian diet we have now) for the climate, and speculating about how difficult it would be for me to give up dairy milk.

So I started doing a little more investigating, this time focusing on the question, "Which plant-based milk is best?", and I came across this piece in Food & Wine in which testers tasted and ranked 15 different alternatives. Interestingly, though the ever-popular almond milk met with almost universal approval, there were three other alternatives that outranked it: flax, oat, and macadamia. I was encouraged to see oat milk (which the testers described as "buttery, thick, very close to real milk" and "excellent in coffee") on the list, since it's one of the few plant-based milks that isn't made from nuts, which tend to be imported, expensive, and water-intensive to grow. An analysis by the Green Star Project calls oat milk "a sustainable (and very affordable) choice," which means it ticks all the boxes for an ecofrugal lifestyle.

What intrigued me most about oat milk, however, was the possibility of making our own. I'd already rejected the idea of making almond milk from scratch, since based on the recipes I'd seen, it would be much more expensive than the stuff in cartons and quite a lot of work, to boot—but oats are very cheap to buy and are already a staple food in our diets, so it would cost almost nothing to try it.

When I mentioned this to Brian, he found the idea interesting enough to whip out our little Magic Bullet blender and try it on the spot. He simply put in half a cup of oats to 1 3/4 cups water, blended it all up together, and strained it with a sieve. (This didn't really remove all the oat residue; a piece of cheesecloth would probably work better.) We both tried it straight out of the blender, and then Brian sweetened it with 2 teaspoons of sugar and a quarter-teaspoon of vanilla and we tried it again. Then, for the final test, Brian poured the rest of it on his morning breakfast cereal and tried it that way. (He threw the strained-out oat residue on there, too, in lieu of the whole oats he usually adds, but this part of the experiment was not a success, as the ground oats were too soggy. Still, he thinks it wouldn't be too hard to put them to use, perhaps in some sort of homemade granola.)

My initial take is that I wasn't nearly as impressed with the flavor of this homemade oat milk—even after sweetening—as the testers at Food&Wine were with the commercial stuff. Aside from the slightly grainy texture of the imperfectly strained milk, I found it had a distinctly oat-y, almost grassy taste, kind of like the water that oatmeal has been cooked in. It wasn't bad, exactly, but it was almost nothing like real milk. So it would definitely take some getting used to. However, Brian had no problem with the taste of it, even drunk straight, and on his cereal, he practically couldn't tell the difference.

So it appears that homemade oat milk has several points in its favor. It's cheap; it's reasonably sustainable as plant-based milks go, and definitely more sustainable than cow's milk; and it's not too hard to make. And the taste, while I don't love it, is fairly inoffensive; it certainly works okay for cereal, and it probably wouldn't clash too much in my morning cocoa.

However, there's one catch: it's not entirely clear that using it in my morning cocoa would actually work. After Brian's little experiment, I went looking for homemade oat milk recipes online to see if there was anything we should try doing differently, and the recipe at A Virtual Vegan came with the caveat that you should not heat it up "with a steam wand or any other method," as it "becomes very thick, very quickly and ends up unsuitable for use in drinks." The recipe from Minimalist Baker contains he same warning: "DO NOT HEAT or it will thicken and become gelatinous in texture." And since the main thing I use milk for is hot cocoa, a milk substitute that can't be used for this purpose isn't much use to me.

On the other hand, I found a very similar oat milk recipe at Simple Vegan Blog, and the author of that one says "you can drink it hot or cold." There was even a query about it in the comments, and the author confirms that heating it up works fine. The editors of Bon Appétit also seemed to have no problem heating up their homemade oat milk; in fact, they said it "really shines when it's steamed or simmered" and called it "the cashmere sweater of winter drinks." So perhaps the difficulties the Minimalist Baker and Virtual Vegan encountered with heating up their oat milk came from the whole dates they used to sweeten it, rather than the oats. In any case, it's clearly possible to make a homemade oat milk that works in hot drinks; it's just a question of whether our version would or wouldn't.

All in all, it looks like we'll need to do a little more experimentation before we can say whether homemade oat milk really is an acceptable all-around substitute for cow's milk. Aside from cocoa, we'd probably want to see how it works in some of our other staple recipes, like soup and pudding, before we'd be prepared to cast aside dairy milk in its favor. But so far, in terms of taste, sustainability, and cost, it looks like the best bet we've seen yet. (Nutrition-wise, of course, it doesn't quite match the profile of dairy milk; it's not too bad on protein, but has no calcium to speak of. But I could find ways to work around that if necessary.)