Plant-based milk experiments follow-up

Three years back, when I was first toying with the question of whether to switch from dairy milk to a plant-based milk of some kind, I did a little experimenting with homemade milk alternatives. I hoped one of these would provide the ultimate ecofrugal alternative to dairy milk: a lower carbon footprint, minimal packaging waste, and low cost, all in one.

Unfortunately, none of the "schmilks" we tried at the time was able to clear this bar. Homemade oat milk, made from rolled oats blended with water, was cheap and easy to make, but it turned into glue when heated, making it useless for hot cocoa. Diluting canned coconut milk with water was just a big mess; the coconut milk didn't dissolve, leaving big lumps of oil floating on a watery base. And most recipes for homemade nut milks were both expensive and complicated to make. 

So I ended up deciding that store-bought almond milk wasn't too bad a deal — especially once we discovered Lidl, which sells it for just $1.89 per half-gallon carton. That's only $3.58 per gallon, only about 20% more than the $3 per gallon we used to pay for dairy milk.

But recently, I found myself growing frustrated with the amount of waste our new, otherwise green habit was producing. Almond milk cartons now make up the bulk of our household trash, and they require us to empty the kitchen bin much more often than we used to. 

So one day, I started casually searching online to see if I could find a brand that came in some kind of recyclable container. And in the process, I came across this page on Nest and Glow arguing that all packaged plant-based milks are unsustainable and the best alternative is to make your own. And moreover, it claimed to offer a way of doing this that "costs pennies and takes 30 seconds."

The key? Ready-made nut or seed butter. By simply blending this with water and an appropriate sweetener, it claimed, you can get a perfectly acceptable schmilk that's both cheaper and more sustainable than any store-bought alternative. True, it only lasts three days in the fridge, but it's so easy to make, that's no big deal. You can always whip up more in under a minute.

So, on our next visit to Costco, we grabbed a jar of almond butter to try this experiment with. (Even if it didn't work, we figured, we could always use it up in sandwiches.) The recipe said to sweeten it by blending a date into the mixture, but we didn't want to spring for dates as well, and anyhow, we suspected it would make the milk lumpy. So we just threw a teaspoon of sugar into the Magic Bullet along with a tablespoon of almond butter, a pint of water, and a pinch of plain salt (not the sea salt the recipe rather snobbishly calls for), and blended it up.

The result, as you can see, didn't look much like milk. And it didn't taste much like milk, either. In fact, what it mostly tasted like, not surprisingly, was almonds. It had a much stronger almond flavor than the commercial almond milk we've been buying, probably because it has a lot more actual almond in it. But the almond flavor wasn't unpleasant, and when I tried the DIY almond milk on cereal and in a glass with a cookie, the flavors seemed compatible enough. So far, so good.

Cost-wise, it wasn't too bad either. The 27-ounce jar cost us about $8 and contained 48 tablespoons for $8, so each cup of the milk contains about 17 cents' worth of almond butter. The sugar, even organic sugar, adds less than a penny per cup, and the cost of the water and salt is negligible. So all told, it's $0.18 per cup, or $2.88 per gallon — actually cheaper than dairy milk. The packaging waste is minimal: just the plastic jar from the almond butter, which is recyclable. The effort involved in making it is fairly trivial. And it's even lower in added sugars that the commercial almond milk we buy now (4 grams per cup as opposed to 7 grams).

However, I wasn't ready to commit to the DIY almond milk yet. It still had to pass the Cocoa Test. So the next morning, I mixed some of the homemade schmilk with sugar and cocoa and heated it in the microwave. The resulting brew looked like cocoa, smelled like cocoa, and unlike the gluey oat-milk version, stirred like cocoa. But what it tasted like...was almond. The stronger almond flavor of the DIY schmilk completely overpowered the taste of the cocoa.

This almond non-cocoa didn't actually taste bad. It made a perfectly acceptable accompaniment to my morning slice of toast. But it wasn't cocoa, and cocoa is what I want with my breakfast. If I wanted to switch to this DIY almond milk permanently, I'd have to give up my morning cup of cocoa in favor of a morning cup of hot almond beverage. And that's a sacrifice I'm just not prepared to make yet.

Still, I haven't altogether given up on the nut butter milk as a concept. Doing a little more research, I discovered that you can buy a commercial "nutbase" for almond milk that's made from blanched almonds, rather than roasted almonds like the almond butter we bought at Costco. (At $20 for 27 servings, it's definitely not ecofrugal, but it's a proof of concept.) I suspected this might give it a milder almond flavor, and sure enough, this MasterClass article by chef Alice Waters notes that "Raw almonds will yield a milder taste" in a homemade almond butter.

So maybe the ultimate ecofrugal approach to plant-based milk would be to make it a three-step process. Step one, make homemade almond butter from raw or blanched almonds, roughly three cups' worth at a time, and store it in the fridge. Step two, blend a quarter-cup of this almond butter up with water and sugar every evening or two to make a quart of homemade almond milk. And step three, heat the homemade almond milk with cocoa and sugar every morning to make my breakfast cocoa.

Better still, we could use the method proposed by Alpha Foodie: make the DIY almond butter from blanched almonds, then freeze it in an ice cube tray. Then, any time we wanted almond milk, we could skip step two and simply dissolve one of the frozen cubes in warm or cold water. This might not work so well for cold almond milk (I imagine they'd take quite a lot of stirring to melt), but it would probably work fine in hot water for my morning cocoa. If it worked, it would be barely any more effort than pouring commercial almond milk out of a carton. The only part that would be time-consuming would be making and freezing the almond butter, and we would only have to do that every couple of months.

Plus, since almonds at Costco are even cheaper than almond butter — about $4 per pound, or $1 per cup — DIY almond milk made from scratch would be the cheapest plant-based schmilk of all. It would only cost around 8 cents a cup, or $1.28 per gallon. That's less than half the price of dairy milk, and virtually no packaging waste, to boot. It's hard to get more ecofrugal than that.