Plant-based milk experiments: The conclusion

After about a month since my last post on our attempts to become a milk-free household, I figured it was time for an update. And I'll go ahead and lead with the fact that we seem at last to have found a (mostly) satisfactory solution.

The Wholesome Pantry coconut milk from Shop Rite, which I tried right after the Aldi almond milk, was not that solution. I liked it quite well to drink by itself, but it had a very pronounced coconut flavor—much stronger than the homemade coconut milk we tried—which wasn't ideal for all applications. The coconut flavor was reasonably compatible with breakfast cocoa, but it tasted a little off in an egg cream, and it would never work in, say, mushroom-barley soup.

So, on our next visit to Trader Joe's, I decided to check out their selections, hoping for something like oat or flax milk to try next. However, their only choices were soy, almond, and coconut (all available in sweetened and unsweetened, vanilla or plain). But the thought crossed my mind that maybe it would be worth trying the almond milk, even though I hadn't liked Aldi's. I figured there had to be some reason this particular "schmilk" was so popular, so maybe the off taste I'd detected in the Aldi milk was just a peculiarity of that particular brand.

Sure enough, the TJ's almond milk tasted much better than Aldi's. Sweet, creamy, and fairly neutral in its flavor, with little to no almond taste, it worked fine in every application we tried: straight up, on cereal, in cocoa, and in egg creams. Brian also tried using some to make his favorite chocolate pudding and found it actually worked better than the skim milk we've been using, giving it a lighter, silkier texture that melted in the mouth. It's a little more expensive than the Aldi almond milk, at $2.69 per half gallon, and the nearest Trader Joe's store isn't quite as close to us as the nearest Aldi, but then again, we pass right by it our regular route to Princeton on Thursdays, so it should be easy to work it into our routine.

However, finding one alternative we liked didn't stop us from trying a couple of others when the opportunity presented itself. For example, last weekend we happened to be low on almond milk at around the same time we were making a run to Shop Rite, so rather than go out of our way to hit the Trader Joe's as well, we decided to pick up a carton of Wholesome Pantry almond milk and see how we liked that. It turned out to have a mild, sweet flavor with a more noticeable almond taste than the TJ's brand, but not enough to make it incompatible with chocolate. So we now have that available as a backup option (that's only a tiny bit pricier) for any time we can't easily make it to Trader Joe's.

Then yesterday, Stop & Shop sent me a coupon for a free half-gallon of Mariani walnut milk, so we gave that a try as well. The only variety they had at our local store was plain and unsweetened, which tasted noticeably different from the almond milks, with no sweetness whatsoever and just the faintest hint of walnut flavor. However, it was pretty neutral-tasting, and we thought it would work fine for both sweet and savory dishes, as long as we adjusted the amount of sugar to compensate. We did discover one odd thing about it, though; when Brian used some in a bread pudding, it took much longer to bake than usual and still never got completely firm. This made us wonder if maybe it was some special property of cow's milk that gave bread pudding its texture, and we might run into the same problem if we made it with almond milk. However, when I checked bread pudding recipes online, I found several that used almond milk, soy milk, or even plain water, so clearly it's not impossible to make a bread pudding that's dairy-free; we'll just have to experiment a bit more.

I should also mention that, the last time we were at Aldi, we decided to grab one more carton of their almond milk just to make 100 percent sure it wouldn't work for us. I thought it was possible that I'd just happened to get a bad batch the first time I tried it, and Brian thought maybe now that my palate had adjusted to almond milk, the Aldi stuff wouldn't taste so odd. But the second carton merely confirmed our results; when we tasted it side-by-side with the Trader Joe's brand, we could both detect a faint but distinct difference. So, while it would have been nice to go with the cheapest almond milk, we're willing to pay an extra 80 cents a carton for the quality we like.

Or perhaps, to be more accurate, I should say the quality I like. Because Brian, it turns out, has found a way to manage his morning breakfast cereal without using any milk—or any kind of packaged "schmilk"—at all.

Now, Brian grew up drinking 2 percent milk, and that's what he used on his cereal before moving in with me. However, he found that he was able to adapt to using skim milk—even powdered milk, when we were using that—without too much difficulty, even though he found the flavor vastly different for drinking. So he reasoned that for his cereal, flavor wasn't a big concern; all he really needed to do was moisten it. So, as an experiment, he decided to try it with plain water instead of milk. This, he found, had a slightly harsh flavor, so he tried "softening" it by adding a bit of salt and sugar. He used about 1/2 teaspoon of salt and 1 tablespoon of sugar to a quart of water, mixing it up in one of our milk bottles and storing it in the fridge.

When he tried this softened water on his cereal, it actually tasted fine, but it looked a little odd. He was used to having a white liquid in the bowl, and the clear liquid was off-putting. So he hit on the idea of taking the walnuts that he normally crumbles onto his morning cereal—about three tablespoons' worth—and soaking them overnight in a little over a cup of the softened water, then grinding up the mixture in the Magic Bullet in the morning. Then he dumps the contents, solids and liquids together, onto his cereal. So, in effect, he's making a homemade walnut milk, except the walnuts aren't costing him anything extra, since he was using them on the cereal anyway. Thus, the only extra expense is the sugar and salt he's adding to the water. It does mean a little bit of extra prep time in the morning, but then again, it saves him the effort of crushing up the walnuts by hand, so it comes out about even.

In conclusion, it looks like we have both managed to find acceptable alternatives to milk for use at home. This does not mean we'll be giving up milk completely; I have no plans to become one of those annoying people who holds up the line at the coffee shop asking what kinds of milk alternatives they have, nor do we want to put friends and family to the trouble of getting special schmilk for us when we come to visit. We're really trying to avoid the stereotype of the obnoxious vegan by practicing our carbon-light diet in a way that doesn't inconvenience anyone else. We're not trying to achieve total ideological purity here, just to shrink our carbon footprint as much as we can reasonably manage.

So, having successfully solved the milk problem, our next challenge is going to be cheese—and this, I suspect, is going to be a lot tougher. After all, making an acceptable milk alternative really isn't that hard; as I noted when I first started experimenting with schmilks back in August, almond milk has been around for centuries. But these plant milks simply don't curdle like cheese. Making a vegan substitute for Parmesan isn't too hard, since it's the flavor and not the texture you need; I've seen lots of recipes for homemade versions made from nutritional yeast with ground nuts, bread crumbs, or straight out of the bottle, all of which would probably serve the purpose. But for something like cheddar or mozzarella, it's much harder to find a substitute. Yes, there are vegan cheese alternatives on the market, but the ones we've seen are either very expensive, not very good, or both. For instance, when we needed to serve a pizza to a vegan friend, we tried Daiya, which is cited on many lists (like  Huffington Post Australia and Spruce Eats) as the best mozzarella alternative out there, and we found it was merely okay. The taste wasn't bad, but it didn't really melt and stretch like the real thing.

Right now, we're thinking our best approach might be just to cut down on cheese, rather than trying to find a substitute for it. We can make recipes that rely on cheese less often, and when we make them, reduce the amount we use. Tonight, for example, Brian whipped up a batch of quesadillas that had maybe a quarter to a third of a pound of shredded Monterey Jack, rather than the half-pound he's been using, spread out across the usual volume of black beans and spinach, and while the texture was certainly different, it wasn't unsatisfying. Since we're not trying to go full vegan, simply cutting back on cheese will allow us to shrink our food footprint while still enjoying a cheesy dish once in a while. And, as a bonus, it will make those cheese-based dishes cheaper, too—which is what ecofrugality is all about.