Homemade oat milk experiment, part 3

Nearly four years back, when Brian and I first began seriously exploring the idea of going dairy-free, we decided to try making our own oat milk. If this worked, I thought, it would be the ultimate ecofrugal milk alternative, made from a cheap, readily available grain with a low carbon and water footprint. And no packaging waste, either.

Sadly, this experiment did not turn out well. The oat milk wasn't too bad on cereal or drunk straight, but when I tried heating it up for cocoa, it turned into a thick, gluey, and quite undrinkable substance. So I discarded that idea and eventually settled on a store-bought almond milk as my new cocoa delivery system.

From an ecofrugal standpoint, this was okay but not great. It wasn't that much more expensive than dairy milk, especially once the new Lidl supermarket opened up in our area selling it for $1.89 a carton, and it was definitely a better choice for the climate. But there was still the heavy water use associated with the almonds and, even more annoying, all the nonrecyclable cartons, which now make up the bulk of our household trash.

We experimented with making our own almond milk from scratch and, after a bit of tinkering, came up with a recipe that worked reasonably well. But it was a lengthy process — first peeling the almonds, then blanching them, then grinding them to a paste, blending that paste with water, and sweetening it. And even after all that work, the finished result wasn't quite as good as the commercial almond milk; it was thinner, more watery, and gritty with suspended bits of almond. It didn't seem worth the effort just to avoid the packaging waste.

Still, I couldn't get past the idea that there must be some better, more ecofrugal option. I kept thinking back to our earlier experiment with oat milk and thinking there must be some way to fix the texture problem. After all, commercial oat milk doesn't turn to glue when heated, so what do the manufacturers know that we don't? What are they doing to their product to preserve its texture, and why can't we do the same?

After a bit of searching, I finally hit on the answer: enzymes. As this Popular Science article explains, the reason oat milk slimes up when heated is that it releases a sugar called amylose, which bonds together into a sort of gel. But if you add an enzyme called amylase, it breaks down the amylose and amylopectin in the oats into glucose, which eliminates the sliminess and makes the oat milk sweeter. The article even provides a detailed recipe explaining how to do it.

After reading this article, I was eager to give it a try for myself. However, the first step — getting my hands on some amylase — proved trickier than I expected. You can't just buy this stuff at the supermarket, and searching for it online turned up a lot of products that contained some amylase, but not the pure form I needed for the recipe. But eventually, I managed to find a 1.5-ounce container for just a few bucks from a Walmart seller.

The next hurdle was figuring out how much to use. The recipe calls for 16.7 milligrams per quart of oat milk, but we have no scale capable of measuring out such a tiny quantity, and the recipe provides no information about what volume this translates to. At first, Brian considered emptying out the entire 1.5-ounce package into a measuring cup to figure out its volume, then using that information to figure out what percentage of the volume to use. But eventually, he decided to use the instructions on the package for brewers, which said to use "1 teaspoon per 5 gallon batch." That worked out to one-twentieth of a teaspoon for a quart of oatmilk, so he just took our tiniest eighth-teaspoon measure, filled it a little less than half full, and hoped for the best.

Even once he'd worked out the ingredients, making the oat milk was a fairly complicated and messy process. The enzymes had to sit with the oats and water for about ten minutes before blending, and then the resulting liquid had to be strained twice, once through a colander and once through cheesecloth (or, in our case, thriftily reused old pantyhose) to remove all the solids. It took a messy ten minutes or so of work to produce a reasonably milky-looking liquid.

The first thing we discovered upon tasting it was that adding the amylase hadn't sweetened it noticeably. We still had to add a fair amount of sugar to get it to approximately the sweetness of dairy milk. It still had a noticeably oaty flavor, but it wasn't unpleasant. But our real concern was the texture. Even cold, it was definitely thicker than the almond milk; how would it stand up to heating?

The answer turned out to be "so-so." When I made a cup of cocoa from the homemade oat milk the next day, it did thickened up noticeably in the microwave, but it remained liquid enough to drink. However, despite the two-stage straining Brian had given it (plus a thorough shaking before use), the oat milk still had a somewhat grainy quality, leaving a fair amount of sludge in the bottom of the cup. It also needed quite a bit of sugar to get it to its normal level of sweetness.

In short, this recipe was a limited success. We were able to produce a drinkable milk substitute from it, and one that's a lot eco-friendlier and a lot cheaper than our packaged almond milk. (By my calculations, the recipe used about 20 cents' worth of oats and maybe 10 cents' worth of amylase, for a total of 30 cents per quart — less than a third of the price of the Lidl almond milk.) But it took a lot of effort, and the flavor and texture of the finished product were only okay. I'm not sure that either the savings or the environmental benefits are enough to justify making the switch.

We've still got a lot of amylase left, so we'll probably try playing around with this recipe some more to see if we can improve it further. One post I found on Reddit said it was possible to produce a "sweet, smooth, and creamy" oat milk using considerably more enzymes — half a teaspoon each of alpha and gluco amylase — and letting the mixture sit for a full two hours before blending, so maybe we should see what we can do with a larger amount of amylase and a longer steeping time. That won't eliminate the hassle of mixing and straining the stuff, but it might produce a good enough beverage to make it worth the effort.