Soy coffee creamer experiment

One of the many plant-based "schmilks" I've tried since I first gave up the moo juice is Silk Protein. Nutritionally speaking, this stuff is very impressive, with a whopping 10 grams of protein per glass—much more than most plant milks, and even more than dairy milk—and only 3 grams of sugar. And its flavor and texture are very close to the real thing, as well. Its biggest drawback is its price: typically around $5 for a half-gallon. That's far more than the $2.39 we pay for half a gallon of Lidl soy milk, our current schmilk of choice. (Soy milk's vaguely grassy flavor isn't my favorite, but I've found that in a cup of cocoa it's not too noticeable.) However, it's still cheaper than most liquid coffee creamers you can buy, either dairy or otherwise, and significantly lower in sugar. So we use the Silk for coffee, as well as for the occasional glass to accompany a cookie, and soy milk for most other applications.

Until recently, Silk Protein was available at our local Stop & Shop, just half a mile down the street. But in March, Stop & Shop closed that store. This was a problem, because this particular variety of Silk is a bit of a specialty item. It's not available at any of the stores where we normally shop (Lidl, Trader Joe's, Costco), nor at any other supermarket that's on our regular route. To buy it now, we have to make a special trip to another Stop & Shop in our area. This is doubly disgruntling for us, because aside from the extra time and gas, we hate to continue giving Stop & Shop our business after what they did to our town. But the only other chain that carries Silk Protein is Acme, and the nearest one of those is even farther off our usual route. So over the past few months, we've swallowed our distaste and made a couple of runs to Stop & Shop just for this item. 

But in the wake of our success with making our own plant butter, I started wondering whether I could also make a homemade coffee creamer that would do as good a job as the Silk Protein—perhaps even at a lower cost. Since one of the perks of the Silk was its protein content, I decided to focus on creamer recipes based on soy milk, a reasonably high-protein plant milk that we always have on hand. I'd already tried coffee with just straight soy milk and found it didn't work well at all; it was too thin and watery, so all it did was dilute the coffee without adding any body to it. What I hoped to find was a recipe that would thicken up the soy milk to something with a consistency closer to cream.

As it turns out, there are three possible ways to do this:

• Just heat the soy milk on the stove until the liquid is reduced.
• Combine the soy milk with a thickener such as tapioca starch and heat it just briefly.
• 
  Skip the heating step and just blend the soy milk with xanthan gum.

Not knowing which of these methods would work best, I decided to try all three. I made a small batch of each one, using between one-quarter and one-third of a cup of soy milk, depending on which scaled best with the recipe. All three recipes called for sweetener as well as thickener, but since I was aiming for a low-sugar creamer, I left it out. I knew that was might affect the texture, but I figured a recipe that couldn't make a thick creamer without added sugar was no use to me anyway.

The first method, relying on heat alone, was a bit of a pain. Five to eight minutes doesn't sound like a long time, but it's a long time to stand by the stove staring into a pot waiting for the contents to thicken. And if after all that time, the liquid doesn't actually thicken and just forms a skin on top instead, that's an even bigger disappointment. The second method seemed to work a little better; as the starch-enhanced soy milk came to a boil, it did indeed appear to grow a little bit thicker. But like the first batch, it also developed a skin, which wasn't particularly appetizing. 

The third method, simply blending the soy milk with xanthan gum, was the easiest, but it wasn't clear how well it worked. The liquid came out of the blender very foamy, so I couldn't easily tell if it had thickened up any. But as soon as I started pouring it into some coffee, it became apparent that the answer was no. I added three spoonfuls without making any discernible impression on either the color of the flavor of the coffee. Eventually I ended up dumping in the entire batch, equivalent to one-third of a cup of soy milk, and the coffee was still too bitter for my taste.

The other two creamers were a bit thicker, but they didn't perform much better. The second batch, the one with the tapioca starch in it, made the coffee lighter, but not much creamier in flavor. As with the blended creamer, I had to use the whole batch to make the coffee drinkable—and that was for only half a cup of coffee, since I decided to split one cup up between two mugs for the test. 

The first batch, treated with heat only, was the best of the lot. Chilled overnight in the fridge, it thickened up to a consistency that could reasonably be described as creamy, and I was actually able to get a decent-tasting half-cup of coffee out of it. But once again, I had to use almost the entire batch to do so. I started out with a third of a cup of soy milk, and I used all of it for just half a cup of coffee. That means a full cup of coffee would require the equivalent of two-thirds of a cup of soy milk, which is...let's see here...about 20 cents' worth. My Silk Protein can do the same job with about three tablespoons, or 12 cents' worth. And it's a lot less work. 

In short, it looks like my best option for now is to stick with the commercial product. It's kind of a pain to get hold of, but it's a better value than anything I can make at home. And since it uses less liquid for each cup of coffee, it produces less packaging waste as well. But I'll continue to experiment with other recipes for vegan coffee creamer—possibly starting with one of these coconut-milk based recipes from PETA—in hopes of finding a more ecofrugal alternative.