Homemade coffee creamer, take 2

Yesterday I noticed that I was getting toward the end of my last carton of Silk Protein, the plant-based milk I habitually use in my coffee. That was an annoyance, since replenishing it would require a special trip out to the nearest Stop & Shop for just that one item. So I started wondering whether it might be time to take another crack at making my own plant-based coffee creamer. I'd bookmarked a couple of recipes from PETA that were based on coconut milk, but I had my doubts about them; all they did to thicken the coconut milk was heat it, a method that hadn't worked at all when I tried it with soy milk. And I already knew from experience that plain coconut milk, straight out of the can, didn't come close to producing the creamy texture I was looking for.

While hunting around for other vegan creamer ideas, I happened across a couple of pages mentioning oat milk. That got me thinking about our unsuccessful experiment a few years back with making oat milk from scratch. It was okay on its own, but when heated up to make cocoa, it developed a texture similar to Elmer's Glue. But I wondered: would that still happen if I didn't heat it directly, but simply stirred it into a hot cup of coffee? And even if it did thicken up a little, might that added body be a feature rather than a bug?

There was only one way to find out, so I whipped up a quick batch in our little Magic Bullet. I used a cup of water, a quarter-cup of oats, three-quarters of a teaspoon of sugar, and a pinch of salt—roughly the same proportions that Brian uses in his homemade walnut milk. I let that mixture sit in the blender container for half an hour, blended it for about 30 seconds, then strained it twice. I put it through a regular kitchen strainer once to filter out the big chunks, then strained it a second time through some old pantyhose to remove the finer grit. It was a rather slow process and I ended up having to push the liquid around a bit with a spoon, but I was able to get out all the liquid. (Brian mixed the solid residue into the veggie cakes he was making for dinner, so it didn't go to waste.)

The next morning, I tried some of this in my coffee. I was pleased to see that it didn't turn into glue like it had with the cocoa—possibly because it wasn't as hot, or possibly because I just wasn't using as much of it. Unfortunately, I was less pleased with the taste. I dumped in three to four tablespoons of the mixture, but it didn't lighten either the color or the flavor of the coffee by much. Adding more increased the slippery mouthfeel of the brew, but it didn't do much to lessen the bitterness.

This was disappointing, but I wasn't prepared to give up altogether. I thought perhaps adding coconut to the oat milk, as suggested on my favorite vegan blog, would produce the creamy texture I was going for. But before trying that, I had to figure out what to do with the remaining oat-milk-adulterated coffee in my cup. I thought maybe diluting it a little more would help, so I tried dumping in a little of our Lidl soy milk on top of the oat milk. And to my surprise, this combination worked pretty well. Neither the oat milk nor the soy milk helped the coffee much on its own, but together, they were able to produce the creamy cafe-au-lait consistency I was looking for.

That made me wonder if I even needed to mess with the coconut. Maybe all I had to do was combine the homemade oat milk with some amount of soy milk before using it. That would probably be much cheaper than adding coconut to the oat milk, and the resulting mixture would be higher in protein. And it would stretch out one batch of the oat milk, so I wouldn't need to mix it up as often.

So, for my afternoon cup of coffee, I tried mixing the oat milk with an equal volume of soy milk and adding a generous splash of that to the java. This didn't quite do the trick; it was still too thin and too bitter. But I continued to mix in a bit more soy milk, then a bit more, until I finally got something palatable. It looks like I need to combine roughly one and a half parts soy milk to one part homemade oat milk, and then use nearly a third of a cup of the resultant mixture, to get my coffee the way I like it.

But is this more cost-effective than the Silk Protein? Well, a cup of oat milk uses a quarter-cup of oats (about 7 cents' worth), three-quarters of a teaspoon of sugar (less than 1 cent), and a pinch of salt (negligible cost). And a cup and a half of the Lidl soy milk costs about 35 cents. So that's roughly 43 cents for two and a half cups, which is seven and a half servings. That works out to a little under 6 cents per serving—less than half the cost of the Silk Protein, even if I'm using significantly more of it. It'll take a little bit of work to mix up a new batch of the oat milk every few days, but that's not nearly as inconvenient—or polluting—as having to drive to the store every time I run out of creamer.

All in all, I think this oat-and-soy mixture may be just the homemade coffee solution I've been looking for. I'll keep tinkering with the proportions over the next few days to see what works best. But if all goes well, I can cross Silk Protein—and with it, Stop & Shop—off the list of things I need in my life.