Dessert experiments

If you live anywhere in the eastern half of the country, you already know we're in the throes of a heat wave. Here in New Jersey, we got a bit lucky today: a heavy thunderstorm hit this morning, keeping today's heat index down to a mere 99 degrees F. But by 9 am tomorrow, we're expected to be in triple-digit territory, and we won't be back to a more normal level of summer heat until Wednesday night. All of which makes this an excellent week to enjoy ice cream and other frozen treats.

But before I get to my lighthearted dessert content, I'd like to take one minute to talk seriously about this massive heat wave. We all know, or at least nearly 80% of Americans do, that climate change is real, and that it's making dangerous weather like this much more common. And a solid majority of Americans want the government to do something about it, supporting a variety of policies that would help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In particular, three-quarters of all Americans think we should regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. 

Unfortunately, EPA director Lee Zeldin is not one of them. He recently announced a plan to eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions standards for fossil fuel plants, arguing that this pollution is not "significant." He bases this claim not on how much of it there is or how much damage it does, but on the fact that, in his opinion, it's too expensive to fix. And if there is no "cost reasonable" solution, then by definition, there is no problem. To add injury to this insult to our intelligence, he's also decided this is a good time to repeal the rule that regulates power plants' emissions of mercury and other toxic substances, such as arsenic.

If you agree that this is mind-blowingly stupid, there's a way to make your voice heard. Elders Climate Action (ECA) has created two simple forms you can use to submit comments to the EPA on these proposed rules changes. All you have to do is enter your contact info, make any changes you like to the sample comment ECA has provided, and click submit. The comment form for the greenhouse gas emissions repeal is here, and the one for mercury and toxic air pollution is here.

So, desserts. I mentioned in last week's post that we'd recently tried Trader Joe's new vegan whipping cream and found that it lives up to its name, at least as far as whipping is concerned. Well, this week we got around to trying it in an ice cream base. We went with plain vanilla, since it has so many possible uses, and topped it with fresh berries from our garden. And I have to say, the result left absolutely nothing to be desired. This was the first plant-based ice cream I've ever tried that I literally couldn't tell was vegan. There was nothing about either the flavor or the mouthfeel that would make me suspect it was anything other than good old vanilla ice cream.

In short, this vegan dessert experiment was an unqualified success, and we've still got a little bit of the vegan cream left to tinker with. My idea is to try using it for a small batch of either the chocolate mousse or the raspberry mousse that goes into our anniversary cake. If it works for that—and there seems to be no reason it wouldn't—we can buy some of this stuff, rather than a pint of real cream, and make the cake dairy-free this year. It still won't be vegan, as the sponge cake itself contains eggs, but it will be one step closer to it.

But Brian and I were not content to rest on our dessert laurels. Tonight, we tried yet another new vegan ice-cream alternative, this time a healthier version made mostly from fruit. 

This one has a bit of a story behind it. Yesterday morning, we noticed that our neighbors across the street were having a yard sale. We wandered over to take a look, and the one thing on the tables that looked most intriguing to me was a Magic Bullet Dessert Bullet—a machine that claimed it could make "all natural, dairy-free, gluten-free, diabetic-friendly, low fat, low sugar, low calorie desserts everyone can enjoy." I couldn't tell whether the price sticker on top was a 6 or a 9, but when I asked my neighbor about it, he said he'd let me have it for $5. 

Well, I knew we didn't actually need this gadget, and there was a possibility it wouldn't even be able to do anything our blender couldn't. But I remembered that we'd thought the same thing about our regular Magic Bullet when we first acquired it on Freecycle, and it proved to be so useful that when it finally died, we went straight out and paid full price for a new one. There was always the chance that this $5 investment would prove just as worthwhile, and even if it didn't, I knew I'd have no trouble finding a new home for it. We'd only be out $5, and that was a price I was willing to pay just to satisfy my curiosity.

So I took the Dessert Bullet home, opened it up, and perused the recipe book that came with it. All the recipes in it appeared to be built around frozen fruit, with a few additional ingredients like yogurt, peanut butter, chocolate, or coconut thrown in here and there. They were basically smoothies, but with less liquid. The booklet provided instructions on how to prepare and freeze the fruit and how long to thaw it before putting it into the Bullet to get the right consistency.

For our first trial, we decided on a simple chocolate dessert recipe with just three ingredients: a frozen banana (broken into chunks), 2 tablespoons of "raw cacao powder" (which we figured we could swap out for cocoa powder without harming the flavor any), and a drop of vanilla extract. We popped straight out to the Superfresh for a bunch of bananas, peeled two of them, broke them into chunks, and put them in the freezer. 

The instructions said to freeze them for at least 24 hours, so we had to wait until tonight to give our new machine a literal whirl. It has several parts: the base containing the motor a chute to insert the fruit in, a pusher to shove it down with, a rotating screw attachment that grinds it up, and a couple of different orifices to extrude it from. We chose the basic oval mouth rather than the star-shaped one. Following the instructions, we let the frozen banana pieces thaw for 5 minutes and sprinkled them with the cocoa powder. We ran the vanilla extract through first to coat the screw attachment, then dumped in the bananas and pushed them down as the motor ran. After a few seconds, the banana reemerged, transformed into a wide ribbon of roughly soft-serve consistency.

The process was interesting to watch, but the finished product was far from life-changing. It did not taste at all like chocolate ice cream; it tasted, unsurprisingly, like a banana coated with cocoa powder. It wasn't bad, exactly, but it wasn't any more enjoyable than just eating a banana, which is a lot less work. If anything, it was less enjoyable, since the texture was a bit slimy. As a dessert, it wasn't nearly as satisfying as a cup of my low-sugar hot cocoa. 

Out of curiosity, I tried topping the banana mixture with a spoonful of the vegan vanilla ice cream we'd made the night before. As you might expect, this combination was vastly superior to the banana alone, but it wasn't nearly as good as the vanilla ice cream with raspberries. And I think adding more than that one little dollop of the vanilla stuff would have nullified any claim this banana dessert has to being healthful. 

So far, the Dessert Bullet doesn't look like a game changer, but we're not giving up on it yet. There are a couple of recipes in the booklet that don't depend primarily on banana, like Creamy Berry Sorbet (a blend of frozen strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries with unsweetened coconut) and Coconut Colada (a misleadingly named blend of frozen coconut-milk yogurt, frozen pineapple chunks, and unsweetened coconut). We'll try at least one of these, as well as a few other combinations of fruit, before deciding whether this gadget deserves a spot in our crowded kitchen cabinets.

[Edit, 7/2/25: Nooooo! We just tried to buy another carton of the vegan whipping cream at Trader Joe's, only to learn that it's been discontinued. The only plant-based alternative to cream we've ever found that was really satisfactory, and it's gone forever. I guess at least we know now a true vegan cream substitute is possible, but that's cold comfort if we can never find one again.]

Even more ecofrugal episodes

Nothing happened this week that seemed big enough to warrant an entire blog post on its own, so instead I'm doing another of my ecofrugal episodes posts—a roundup of the small successes and failures in our ecofrugal life. Fortunately, this time the successes outnumber the failures. 

Item #1: A grout makeover  

My birthday request this year was for Brian to replace the grout in our upstairs tub-shower, which had developed stains that no amount of scrubbing could remove. (This photo—taken after the grout had just been cleaned—doesn't really do it justice, but it should give you an inkling of how bad it was.) It wasn't until this month that we finally had a free weekend to tackle the project, and we ran into a couple of setbacks while carrying it out. 

First, after he'd already scraped out as much as he reasonably could of the old grout, Brian discovered that the pre-mixed grout he'd bought to replace it was was actually sanded grout, which isn't recommended for narrow gaps like this. (It would have been nice if the package had said this on the front, rather than in small print on the back.) So we had to make a hasty trip to Home Depot to replace it. We also grabbed an extra tube of caulk, just in case we needed extra. At first, Brian thought this purchase had been a waste of money, since the old tube ended up having enough in it to fill all the joints. But he learned otherwise the next morning, when he discovered that the caulk he'd just applied, which was supposed to set up within two hours, was still liquid. Clearly it was no longer good, so he had to spend part of that morning laboriously removing all the goo and replacing it with fresh caulk from the new tube. 

So this birthday request proved to be more of a hassle than we expected, but it turned out well in the end. Every time I've stepped into the shower this past week, I've been delighted at how fresh and clean the grout looks now. Brian even took the extra step of repainting the grungy-looking trim on the tub window, so the whole enclosure now looks sparkling and new. Once the new grout has had a couple of weeks to cure fully, we're going to follow up by applying a sealant, which will allegedly keep it fresh and stain-free  for the next few years. And even when it wears off, we can just apply a new coat, rather than going through this entire messy job again.

Item #2: Pride pants 

Recently, I noticed that my older pair of blue jeans was starting to wear out in the thigh area. This is a common occurrence for me, but this time the pattern was a bit unusual: instead of spreading across the whole inner thigh area, the threadbare sections were confined to a line right along the inseam. I thought this would be a good spot for a little visible mending, but wasn't sure whether it made more sense to darn these tiny holes individually or try to cover all of them with a patch. 

I went hunting for suggestions online and came across this image: a long row of stitches in different colors of embroidery floss running down the length of the seam. I decided to try a similar idea, but with a rainbow color scheme. The whole worn area was about 12 centimeters long, so I divided it up into sections of roughly 2 centimeters for each color. I started at one end putting in parallel stitches in red embroidery floss, then about 2 centimeters down I tied off the red thread and started on orange, and so on down the spectrum to purple.

I've only done one seam so far, since the wear on the other isn't quite as bad, but eventually I intend to do the other one to match. The stitching is far from perfect, but it's colorful and cute and gives me a little boost of happiness every time I wear these jeans now. And it's just in time for Pride Month!

Item #3: Repair, then replace 

About a year ago, our old toilet seat broke. Rather than buy the cheapest model to replace it, we decided to spring for one with "soft close" hinges. I quite enjoyed this feature, but unfortunately, these slow-closing hinges weren't very durable. A couple of days ago, I noticed that the lid was askew, and when I examined it, I discovered that one of the hinges had snapped clean through. I managed to wiggle it through so that the lid could close fully, if no longer softly, but this clearly wasn't going to be a long-term solution.

Rather than run out to buy a whole new toilet seat, Brian decided to try repairing the hinge with epoxy. He applied the glue to both broken edges, then clamped the lid in the open position overnight to give it plenty of time to set. But sadly, as soon as he unclamped it in the morning and tried lowering the lid, it snapped straight apart again. 

Although this repair wasn't a success, I still think it was worth making the attempt. It didn't cost us anything except a little extra time, and we had no way of knowing it wouldn't work unless we tried it. And now that we know, we feel no guilt about discarding the broken toilet seat and spending $40 on a replacement. (This time around, we spent $10 more for one with metal hinges, which we're assuming will hold up better. Paying the extra $10 now seems like a better deal than spending $30 to replace the whole thing again in another year.)

Item #4: Whipping it good 

Ever since we first started cutting back on dairy products back in 2018, we've been looking for a decent substitute for whipped cream. We tried numerous homemade versions using various combinations of coconut cream, aquafaba, and plant milk, with results ranging from near success (but not quite) to colossal failure. We tried a commercial product called Coco Whip that worked reasonably well in a raspberry fool, but the store where we found it has since stopped carrying it. And we tried one or two commercial plant-based cream substitutes that were so unimpressive I didn't even bother blogging about them.

But on a couple of recent trips to Trader Joe's, we've noticed a product in their dairy case called "Vegan Heavy Whipping Cream Alternative." We couldn't remember if we'd tried this one before, but at only $4 a pint—about the same price as regular cream—we didn't have much to lose by giving it another go. So we grabbed a pint, and last weekend Brian took a crack at using some in a honeyberry fool (a phrase I love having the opportunity to say). And right away, we noticed that this stuff actually was whipping up like real cream. It formed genuine stiff peaks that held their shape and didn't collapse even when we folded in the berry mixture. And if the flavor and mouthfeel weren't exactly identical to real cream, you could hardly tell by the time it was combined with the berries.

We only used about half the pint for this experiment, so we're going to try tinkering with it further, seeing if it can make a plant-based ice cream that works better than our iced coconut cream (which didn't turn out so well the second time we tried it). If it works for that too, we'll probably stop messing around with DIY versions and make this our go-to substitute for any recipe that calls for cream—possibly even our anniversary cake.

Item #5: Extension cord life extension

One of the items we picked up at last year's yard sales (or, to be exact, from the piles of discards after the sales) was an electric hedge trimmer. It's just a light-duty plug-in model, but since our property only has one hedge and we only trim it a couple of times a year, it's been perfectly adequate for our needs. But last Friday, Brian discovered its biggest drawback: make one false move with it and you cut right through your extension cord. To add insult to injury, he had noticed that the cord was in harm's way and was just attempting to move it out of the way when it happened. 

Naturally, he was quite annoyed that this one brief slip had, as he thought, totally destroyed an extension cord that would cost around $17 to replace. But then he discovered that it's actually possible to cut off the damaged portion and attach a replacement connector, which only costs about $3. You just end up with a slightly shorter cord—in this case, 47 feet instead of 50, which is still plenty for our small yard. Less cost, less waste, and less frustration about having damaged the old one. (Of course, if this keeps happening, the cord will gradually get shorter each time until it's too short to be of much use. But I suspect after this incident, he'll take extra care to keep the cord out of danger in future.)

Ice cream without the cream

Ever since Brian and I went off dairy for most purposes in 2018, we've been trying to find a reasonable dairy-free alternative to ice cream. You can, of course, buy nondairy frozen desserts, and we've tried several, but we never found one we loved enough to justify the fairly substantial price tag. And the homemade versions we've tried, such as iced coconut milk and plum whip, didn't quite satisfy that ice-cream craving. They were cold and sweet, but they didn't have the creamy smoothness of the real thing. 

So, this week, Brian decided to go for broke and try making a frozen dessert from coconut cream. This stuff is much richer than coconut milk, with around 83 grams of fat per cup, putting it roughly on a par with heavy cream—and it's even higher in saturated fat than real cream. So this vegan dessert would not be, by any stretch of the imagination, a healthy alternative, but he wasn't going for healthy; he was going for satisfying. If the recipe succeeded in giving us the creamy texture we wanted, we could always tweak it later to see how much we could lower the fat content without losing that smoothness.

Another thing Brian thought might help with the texture would be to add more sugar. As a trained chemist, Brian knew that having sugar dissolved in a liquid inhibits the formation of ice crystals, which might prevent this dessert from turning into a solid block of ice the way our iced coconut milk did. The problem there was that the original iced coconut milk recipe was already a bit on the sweet side for me, and adding more sugar would probably make it outright cloying.

However, he thought of a work-around for this problem. We happened to have a container of allulose sweetener in our pantry, left over from my carb-counting period. Allulose is a naturally occurring sugar, but the body doesn't absorb it like other sugars. Thus, it has about two-thirds of table sugar's sweetness with only one-tenth of the calories, and it doesn't spike your insulin levels. Brian figured that by replacing sugar with allulose and scaling up the amount by 50 percent, he'd get roughly the same level of sweetness in a more sugar-saturated solution.

So, Brian took the original coconut milk ice cream recipe from Chocolate Covered Katie and began making modifications. First, he scaled it down by about one-third to fit our new, smaller ice cream maker. Then he replaced the coconut milk with coconut cream and the sugar with allulose. And last, he added cocoa powder to temper the coconut flavor and keep it from being overpowering. 

After mixing up this base and chilling it overnight, he put it in the ice cream maker and turned it on. And it didn't take him long to notice that this coconut-cream mixture was behaving differently from the original coconut-milk base. Not only was it not forming ice crystals, it didn't seem to be freezing at all. It had a fairly thick, smoothie-like texture when it went into the ice cream maker, and after half an hour of mixing, it still had that same smoothie-like texture. Only around the very edges of the bowl did it show any signs of solidifying.

But he wasn't prepared to give up yet. Remembering that the coconut-milk ice cream had turned from a soft-serve consistency to a solid block once he put it in the freezer, he decided to do the same with this mixture. And after a full day of freezing, he discovered that it had indeed firmed up—and in the right way. Instead of freezing solid like the coconut milk, it had developed a smooth, scoopable texture, very similar to a high-fat premium ice cream. And, as we'd hoped, it was almost perfectly smooth, with no detectable ice crystals.

The flavor was pretty good, too. Naturally, it was very coconut-forward, but the distinctive bittersweet note of the cocoa balanced out that nuttiness. The level of sweetness was just about right. Brian described the flavor as having a "bright" note from the coconut milk, but I couldn't detect it. I did find the taste a little on the salty side, but that's easily explained by the fact that Brian couldn't figure out how to reduce the eighth of a teaspoon of salt from the original recipe to one-twelfth of a teaspoon, so he'd just left the amount unchanged. If he took it down to an imprecise pinch, I think the flavor would be just about perfect.

So, on the whole, I'd say this iced coconut cream is our most successful vegan ice cream to date. We'll most likely continue to fiddle with the recipe and see how much of the coconut cream we can replace with soy milk to tone down the richness while still keeping it as smooth as possible. Also, next time we might try skipping the ice cream maker, which didn't seem to alter the texture much, and just putting the coconut-cream base straight in the freezer. But I think the recipe in its current form is good enough to be worth posting in full:

ICED CHOCOLATE COCONUT CREAM

• 1 cup coconut cream
• ⅓ cup allulose
• Small pinch salt
• 2 Tbsp cocoa powder
• ½ tsp vanilla
• ¼ cup soy milk

Mix all ingredients in a saucepan and heat until allulose is dissolved. Refrigerate mixture overnight, then chill in an ice cream maker for half an hour. Freeze until solid.  

According to the recipe tool from My Fitness Pal, one-quarter of this recipe (a smallish scoop) contains 128 calories, 13 grams fat including 10 grams saturated fat, 19 grams carbs including 1 gram fiber and 1 gram sugar, and 2 grams protein. However, most sources indicate that the carbs from the allulose shouldn't really count toward the total, so really the carb count for this dessert is only about 2 grams—low enough for even keto dieters.

A cheeseless adaptation attempt

Before Brian and I started cutting back on dairy at home, we used to be very fond of a recipe we called Cheesy Rice Casserole. This was a slightly modified version of the "Hellzapoppin' Cheese Rice" from Peg Bracken's I Hate to Cook Book, slightly lighter on the cheese and butter. It was a staple in our kitchen repertoire because it was both easy and cheap and required only ingredients we routinely kept on hand, making it perfect for those what-should-we-have-for-dinner occasions.

But since we stopped buying cheese at the store, this trusty recipe has fallen by the wayside. Our homemade vegan mozzarella has allowed us to keep making some of our cheesy favorites, but it doesn't have the right flavor to take the place of the cheddar cheese in this dish. And the one time we tried making it with a dairy-free cheddar we found at Lidl, the result was so weird and unsatisfying that I didn't even think it was worth mentioning on the blog.

A couple of weeks ago, though, I got to wondering if we could replace the cheese in this recipe some other way. Since it already had eggs to serve as a binder, it didn't really need the melted cheese to hold it together. Maybe, I thought, we could just throw in some nutritional yeast for flavor and some tofu to up the protein content and see if that was good enough.

Brian was willing to take on this experiment, but he wasn't entirely convinced that the nutritional yeast alone would give the dish enough flavor. So he found a recipe for a vegan cheddar cheese at Minimalist Baker and borrowed the seasoning mix from that: tapioca starch, nutritional yeast, apple cider vinegar, garlic powder, salt, and a smidgen of mustard. He blended all those ingredients with silken tofu and soy milk to replace the cheese and milk from the original recipe, then mixed that with the eggs, rice, spinach, and seasonings. He also threw in a little lemon juice to increase the brightness a bit. He could have used some of our homemade plant butter to replace the melted butter that would normally be poured over the top, but he thought there was no point in wasting it on something that didn't need to be solid, so he simply whisked together some canola oil, soy milk, and salt. 

The modified casserole came out quite a bit lighter in color than the original, but texture-wise, it seemed pretty close to the original. It held together nicely when sliced, coming out of the pan in even squares. The flavor, however, was severely lacking. It didn't taste bad or weird, like the version we made with the fake cheese from Lidl; it just didn't taste like much of anything. We both had to sprinkle it pretty liberally with our homemade "spaghetti salt" (12 parts nutritional yeast ground up with 1 part salt) to get it down. I found that a dash of smoked paprika was also helpful.

Clearly, this modified recipe isn't ready for prime time. However, we think it has potential. All it really needs is more flavor, and we should be able to give it that by bumping up the proportions of all the flavorful ingredients it already contains. The simplest way to do this would be to double the amounts of nutritional yeast, vinegar, garlic powder, mustard, and lemon that go into the dish and maybe throw in a quarter-tablespoon of the smoked paprika as well. Alternatively, we could try adding a dose of all those ingredients to the water the rice is cooked in, along with the amount that goes into the tofu sauce. With the flavor cooked right into the rice, maybe it won't need so much extra seasoning added on top.

For now, I'm going to refrain from sharing this recipe while we tinker with it some more. If and when we come up with a version that I think is as useful as the original, I'll pass it along to all of you then.

[UPDATE, 3/20/24: We tried this again last night, and we think we've got it fixed. Brian basically doubled the proportion of all the flavorings he'd used to replace the cheese: nutritional yeast, vinegar, garlic powder, and salt. He also added a half-teaspoon of smoked paprika. (He accidentally left out the mustard powder he used the first time, but upon tasting it, neither of us minded its absence.)

This revised recipe had a darker golden color than the previous version—partly from the extra ingredients and partly because it browned better. It also had a much fuller, more savory flavor. With plenty of salt, tartness from the vinegar, and umami from the nutritional yeast, it was well-balanced and satisfying. It wasn't the same as the original version made with cheddar cheese, but it wasn't in any way lacking. We both happily ate up one piece and went back for seconds.

This may not be the absolute final version of this recipe, as Brian is always adjusting and tinkering to optimize the dishes he makes. But it's good enough to be worth sharing. So here, without further ado, is what we are now calling...

HELLZAEFFINPOPPIN CHEESE RICE

Cook 1 cup white rice in 1.5 cups water for approximately 6 minutes in the pressure cooker. (Or use 2 cups water and cook it on the stovetop. Or just use 3 cups leftover rice.)

Briefly cook 8 oz. frozen spinach in boiling water to thaw. Drain completely.

Blend together 8 oz. soft or silken tofu, ¼ cup soy milk, ¼ cup tapioca flour, 6 Tbsp. nutritional yeast, 1 Tbsp. apple cider vinegar, 1 tsp. salt, 1 tsp. garlic powder, and ½ tsp smoked paprika.

Beat together 3 large eggs. Add the tofu mixture, 1/2 chopped onion, 1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce, 1 tsp. salt, 1 pinch dried thyme, 1 pinch dried marjoram, ½ Tbsp. lemon juice, and the drained spinach. Mix, then add the cooked rice and mix again. Spread mixture into a greased 9" by 13" casserole dish, smoothing the top with a spatula. 

Whisk together 4 tsp. canola oil, 1 tsp. soy milk, and ¼ tsp salt. Pour evenly over top of the rice mixture.

Bake at 375 F for 45 minutes. Let cool slightly before serving.]

 

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.

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.

Another vegan whipped cream attempt

In our attempts to eat ecofrugally, whipped cream has always posed one of the biggest challenges. Even before we started moving toward a dairy-free diet, there was the difficulty of disposing of the cans. Once we shifted away from dairy, we ran into all kinds of problems finding a suitable plant-based alternative. Coconut milk and coconut cream invariably failed to whip; aquafaba worked better, but lacked the creamy mouthfeel of the real thing. Eventually we found a canned coconut whip at Trader Joe's that works well for everyday use, but it's still not good for recipes that use whipped cream in bulk, such as raspberry fool and our anniversary cake.

This weekend, we found ourselves pondering this problem yet again. After our successful experiment last week with making our own plant butter, we'd realized that it would be possible to make this Thanksgiving's rhubarb pie fully vegan, and we were discussing whether it might be feasible to do the same with the pumpkin pie. It turned out that our favorite vegan food blogger does, in fact, have a pumpkin pie recipe, but the vegan whipped cream she suggests serving with it is one of those coconut-based versions that have never worked for us. I decided just out of curiosity to search for other vegan alternatives, and to my surprise, I actually found one at Nora Cooks. Just like our new vegan butter, this recipe relied on a mixture of plant milk and melted coconut oil. And we thought, well, if it works as a substitute for butter, why not cream? At any rate, what did we have to lose by trying it?

The recipe called for "unsweetened, unflavored plant milk" and said that soy worked best. However, we had only sweetened soy milk, so we decided to use some unsweetened almond milk we had left over from my carb-counting period. The other thing in the recipe that gave us pause was the amount of sugar it called for: half a cup to two cups of liquid. This seemed like a lot, and when we consulted Pillsbury, we found that this was actually double the amount recommended for regular whipped cream. We knew there was a chance the cream might not whip properly if we halved the sugar, but we also knew we might find it too sweet to eat if we didn't, so we decided to take the risk.

This recipe has two stages. First, you blend together the melted coconut oil and plant milk and let it chill at least 4 hours. Then you add the sugar and vanilla and beat it until it thickens. The recipe warned that this process would take 5 to 10 minutes, and at first, it looked like this would be right on the money. After 4 minutes, it was just beginning to thicken up and take in air; after 11 minutes, it was showing the first signs of forming ridges. But as Brian continued to mix and mix, it never got to the soft-peak stage. Instead, around the 14-minute mark, it began to look a bit curdled. When we pulled the beaters out, we discovered that the coconut oil had begun to re-solidify and was form lumps in the liquid. It was clearly never going to turn into anything resembling whipped cream.

This was a disappointment, but we weren't prepared to give up just yet. We thought the problem might be that the almond milk we used was too watery and hadn't integrated well enough with the coconut oil. We suspected that a higher-protein, higher-fat plant milk would work better, and we happened to have just such a product in the fridge: Silk high-protein plant milk, which I use as a coffee creamer. (It's expensive as plant milks go, but cheaper than most plant-based products sold specifically as coffee creamer, and it tastes better, too.) We'd actually considered using this the first time we made the recipe, but we decided to go with the plain almond milk since it was cheaper, and we knew that if the recipe worked with that it would work with anything. But since it hadn't worked, we decided it was worth giving the Silk a try.

Right from the beginning, this batch showed more promise than the first. The coconut oil blended well into the Silk, and when we pulled the mixture out after the chilling stage, it hadn't begun to separate the way it had with the almond milk. And as Brian began to whip it, whip it good, it thickened much faster. After only seven minutes, it was looking much closer to whipped cream than the first batch. It never got quite stiff enough to cling to the bowl, the way they always get it to do on "The Great British Baking Show." And the texture still wasn't quite what you'd expect from whipped cream; when we tasted it, our tongues could detect tiny blobs of fat that hadn't fully blended in. It was a bit more like a cheap vanilla ice cream—the kind that gets a bit grainy in the freezer—than like whipped cream. But it went down reasonably well over an apple crisp (which, as I predicted, worked fine with our new plant butter).

Even if this vegan whipped cream recipe isn't quite perfect, it at least serves as a proof of concept. We now know it's possible to get something with a flavor and texture close to whipped cream from readily available, plant-based ingredients. Now it's just a matter of tweaking the process to get something we can work with in our favorite whipped-cream-based recipes.

Now that we know it's possible to get plant milk to whip, perhaps for our next attempt we'll try another method that I found at a site called Milk Pick (independently corroborated at Cake Decoration Products). These sites claim that you can get plain old almond milk to whip if you first heat it in a double boiler with sugar, corn starch, and xanthan gum (or some other thickener such as guar gum). If this works, it would be both quicker and cheaper than the coconut-oil method. And if it doesn't, perhaps some combination of the two—such as adding xanthan gum, which is also an emulsifier, to the coconut-Silk mixture—would be more successful.

A small step away from palm oil

After my epic fail with carb counting, I've received permission from my doctor to go back to my carb-ier plant-based diet. This was a definite win for me, since aside from being much more to my taste, it's generally the most ecofrugal way to eat. Plant foods nearly always have smaller carbon footprints and water footprints than animal foods, and a diet with less meat is generally more affordable and healthier as well. But the green halo surrounding plant-based foods has one tiny little tarnished spot: palm oil. 

If you pay a lot of attention to the eco-news, there's a good chance you've already seen at least one story about how palm oil is the secret villain of the plant kingdom. Made from the fruit of oil palms, this cheap and useful oil finds its way into a huge variety of products. It's particularly handy for plant-based foods such as margarine, since it's one of the few vegetable oils that's high in saturated fat and therefore stays solid at room temperature. 

But unfortunately, the way palm fruit is generally grown and harvested does considerable damage to the environment. Because oil palms grow only in tropical climates, the growing demand for palm oil has led to massive deforestation as rain forests are cut to make way for oil palm plantations. Moreover, according to Food Revolution Network (FRN), the people who harvest the palm fruits typically work in grueling conditions for pitiful wages—if they aren't enslaved outright. Some products are made with certified sustainable palm oil, which is supposed to be grown and harvested in a more eco-friendly way. But according to FRN, these labels are often no more than greenwashing. 

The most obvious solution is to avoid products made with palm oil entirely. However, that's by no means as simple as it sounds. According to one estimate, it's found in as many as half of all packaged products sold at the supermarket. This includes both foods (margarine, baked goods, chocolate) and non-food products (soap, shampoo, detergent). In some categories, it's practically impossible to find any products without it.

Granted, it's a little bit easier if you don't buy that many packaged goods to begin with. If your diet is largely whole foods and you make a lot of your own cleaning and personal care products, you may not find quite as much palm oil lurking on your pantry shelves. When I went through ours, paying particular attention to the categories where palm oil is most common, here's what I found:

• Bread. Not generally a problem, since ours is usually home-baked. However, palm oil is listed as an ingredient on the package of flour tortillas we recently picked up. (Interestingly, the "Carb Balance" tortillas we bought when I was on my carb-controlled diet, though no better for my blood sugar, appear to be better for the earth. They contain no palm oil, only partially hydrogenated soybean oil.)
• Cat Food. Our cats eat IAMS dry food, which contains a whole lot of ingredients, but no palm oil.
  
• Cereal. We seldom buy commercial breakfast cereals, relying instead on Brian's homemade granola. Occasionally, when we can find it on sale at Costco, we'll pick up a box of Kellogg's Raisin Bran, but it appears to be entirely innocent of palm oil (and all other oils as well).
  
• Chocolate. Apparently, the "Way to Go" chocolate bars we buy at Lidl are not only Fair Trade certified but also rainforest-friendly, with no palm oil. Lidl's chcoolate chips, though not certified, are similarly clean.
  
• Cookies and other baked goods. Again, most of ours are home-baked. But we do have one box of Girl Scout cookies in our pantry (purchased when we were waylaid by Brownies while out on a walk), and it contains both palm oil and palm kernel oil. There's also palm kernel oil in the "Fiberful" granola bars we picked up one time at Trader Joe's, though the "Simply Nutty" bars we like better are free of it.
• Detergent. The last brand we bought, All Free and Clear, doesn't list palm oil as an ingredient. However, it does contain sodium laureth sulfate, which can be derived from palm oil. There's no way to tell whether it did in this case or not. As far as I can tell, there are only a handful of very pricey detergents that are certified palm-oil-free.
• Dish soap. We use Lidl's store brand, which also contains sodium laureth sulfate. So, again, impossible to tell from the label. 
• Hand soap. The Oatmeal & Honey bar soap from Trader Joe's lists both sodium palmate and sodium palm kernelate, derived from palm oil and palm kernel oil. as its top ingredients. Here, again, there are very few brands without palm oil, and they're all really expensive.
• Shampoo. Brian's shampoo contains sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), which also is often made from palm oil. Again, there's no way to tell if it was used in this particular product, but it isn't one of the few shampoos that are certified palm-oil-free. The same goes for my conditioner, Suave Almond and Shea Butter, which contains such potential palm oil derivatives as cetearyl alcohol and cetrimonium chloride.
  
• Toothpaste. Although most toothpastes contain SLS, ours does not. We buy Trader Joe's peppermint toothpaste specifically to avoid this ingredient because it gives Brian canker sores.
• Vegetable oil spread. We use two kinds: Blue Bonnet for toast and Country Crock Plant Butter for baking. Both contain a mix of vegetable oils that includes palm and palm kernel oils. As far as I can tell, the only plant-based spread that doesn't is the highly regarded, but also highly priced Miyoko's.
  

We're probably on the low end of the bell curve for use of palm-oil products. Many foods that use this ingredient, such as chips, crackers, frozen meals, ice cream, instant noodles, microwave popcorn, and bottled salad dressing, simply aren't part of our diet at all. Yet even with our mostly whole-food diet and our generally eco-conscious shopping habits, we still have a handful of products in our home that definitely contain palm oil or palm oil derivatives, and a few more that we can't be sure about.

Now, I'm not prepared to shell out extra for a soap or a shampoo that I can be absolutely certain is palm-oil-free. I'm also not willing to make my own detergent, an endeavor that as far as I can tell offers minimal savings, if any. (Besides, most recipes for homemade detergent start with soap, which usually contains palm oil anyway.) And so far, all my attempts to make my own hair conditioner have been flops. (The one recipe that seemed to work initially did not hold up well as the week went on.)

But there is one palm oil product on this list I thought we might be able to replace with a homemade version: the vegetable oil spread. Doing this could also save us money, since the Country Crock Plant Butter is pretty pricey (usually around $5 a pound, which is more than we pay for real butter on the rare occasions we buy it). And it would eliminate the need to keep separate products on hand for baking and for spreading.

I've seen several recipes for vegan plant butters online, some simpler than others. One, at Fork and Beans, called for liquid lecithin, an ingredient we don't have and can't easily buy; another, from A Virtual Vegan, seemed a bit too fiddly. But the recipe from The Loopy Whisk looked pretty straightforward and called only for ingredients we had on hand: refined coconut oil, a neutral-tasting cooking oil (we used canola), non-dairy milk (we used unsweetened almond milk), and salt, with an optional pinch of turmeric for color. (We declined the option, since we prefer a white spread to one that tastes of turmeric.) The cost of all these ingredients, by my calculations, is about $1.30 for 2 cups—on a par with our Blue Bonnet, and significantly cheaper than the Country Crock.

The process of making the plant butter is simple enough: just whisk these ingredients together, then chill them until they start to firm up, then whip them again for about two minutes. The recipe said the chilling step would take only 10 to 15 minutes, but it took us 20, even with only a quarter-sized batch. But eventually we got something thick enough to beat up (whisking it by hand, since the container we used was too small to accommodate our mixer's whisk attachment) until "super pale and fluffy." Then we chilled it overnight as instructed.

When I tried it on my toast this morning, I found that it was definitely harder than Blue Bonnet, though not as hard as real butter chilled to refrigerator temperature. This made it a little harder to spread, but I eventually figured out that all I had to do was scrape my knife blade along the surface to remove a thin curl of the "butter." This actually melted into the surface of my hot toast more readily than the Blue Bonnet usually does. And once it was melted in, I could barely taste the difference. It was a little less salty, maybe, but that wasn't a problem in the least.

So we have now determined that this DIY plant butter makes a perfectly good substitute for Blue Bonnet on toast. However, the real acid test will be to see how it does in baking. Brian was already planning to make a pot pie at some point this week, so he'll just use the new plant butter in the crust. If it works as well for that purpose as our Country Crock, then we can just cross this pricey product—and with it, the main source of palm oil in our diet—off our shopping list entirely.

 

Postscript: Success! Brian's plant-butter pie crust came out crisp, flaky, and delicious. He noted that it had a less complex flavor than a crust made with real butter, but the texture was just as good, and actually superior to the results we used to get with the plant butter. It was also better than either straight coconut oil or straight palm oil, both of which we've tried in the past. The coconut-oil crust was tender but limp, while the palm-oil one was very crisp and brittle. This was the perfect golden-brown mean. He now thinks we don't even need to buy butter for this Thanksgiving's pies, which means that our rhubarb pie will actually be vegan. (The pumpkin pie, made with eggs and evaporated milk, will remain vegetarian only.)

We still need to test the new plant butter in cookies and fruit crisp, but we have every reason to believe it will perform just as well for those applications. If it can handle shortcrust, it can handle anything.

[UPDATE, 6/19/24: Since writing this, I've learned that palm oil isn't so bad as I thought. It has been responsible for some tropical deforestation, but not all that much: according to Our World in Data, only about 2% of global forests have been lost to palm plantations. And it's gotten much better in recent years: over 270,000 hectares of land in Indonesia were cleared for oil palm in 2009, but fewer than 48,000 in 2015. So it's not as if our insatiable lust for palm oil is the main reason we're losing the rainforests.

Granted, even a little deforestation is bad, especially in the tropics. But the real catch is that most other oilseed crops require more land to grow than oil palms. If we replaced all the world's palm oil with coconut oil, the closest plant-based substitute, we'd need more than ten times as much land to grow it—all of it in tropical regions. Granted, it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison, since the two crops are farmed very differently. Coconut palms produce more than just oil, and they're also often grown alongside other crops. But it's by no means clear that my coconut-oil-based plant butter is better for the planet than the commercial stuff containing palm oil.

The bottom line: boycotting palm oil isn't really a good idea. It makes more sense to look for products containing palm oil that's sustainably grown. The main sustainable certification for this crop comes from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). If you can't find RSPO-certified products where you shop, try writing to the store and asking for them.]

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.

DIY almond milk from scratch

Two weeks ago, I blogged here about how I'd discovered a new, simple method for making your own almond milk at home by blending almond butter in water (with a little salt and sugar). We tried this with some commercial almond butter from Costco, and the result wasn't bad, but it didn't work well for cocoa; the toasted-almond flavor was so strong that it completely drowned out the flavor of the cocoa powder. But I wondered if it might be possible to produce a homemade almond milk with a milder flavor, more similar to the commercial stuff, by making our own almond butter from blanched rather than roasted almonds.

I can now say definitively that the answer is yes. But it's still not perfect, and it's a bit of a hassle.

Making this completely-from-scratch almond milk last weekend was a multi-stage process:

1. 
   First, Brian blanched the almonds using the process outlined by Alpha Foodie. The blog claims this process only takes five minutes, but it takes rather longer if you're processing a cup of almonds at once. As the recipe notes, peeling them is quite easy: just pinch them and they shoot right out of their skins (and go skidding across the table if you're not careful). But you can only do that to one almond at a time, so it takes a good while to get through a cupful.
2. Then, he ground the almonds into butter using Alice Waters' recipe. Here's where he encountered his second snag: The almonds wouldn't grind easily. He tried it in both the Magic Bullet and the food processor, and in both cases, the motor started to burn. He ended up having to add roughly a quarter-cup of canola oil to the almonds just to reduce them to a paste, and he would have added more if he hadn't been afraid of mucking up the texture. Maybe our little food processor doesn't qualify as the "sturdy" model that Waters recommends.
3. He took a tablespoon of this blanched-almond butter and blended it up with two cups of filtered water, a teaspoon and a half of sugar, and an eighth-teaspoon of salt. That's roughly equivalent to the pinch of salt and single date recommended in the Nest and Glow recipe.

As you can see here, the resulting almond milk had a much lighter color than the stuff made from commercial almond butter. It had a much lighter flavor, too, very close to the almond milk we buy in cartons at the store. The big difference between this and the commercial product was texture. 

Brian ground the almond butter as finely as he could and then blended it very thoroughly with the water, but it still didn't blend completely. There were tiny solid particles suspended in the liquid, which precipitated out when it sat overnight. Getting them back into suspension wasn't a big problem; I just gave the bottle a good shake, the same way I do with the carton of commercial almond milk. But the little flecks of almond in my breakfast cocoa gave it a rather chewier texture than I'm used to.

Mind you, this was only our first attempt, and it's possible we might be able to get the almond milk a little smoother with a little tweaking. Maybe processing the almonds in our big blender on the "grind" setting would work better than using our little Magic Bullet or our little food chopper. Or maybe we could simply strain the almond milk after blending it. But that would also add a fourth step to the process, making it more work than before.

So we're going to need to fiddle with this recipe a bit more before we decide if it can really take the place of our packaged almond milk from Lidl. It comes down to two questions: (1) can we come up with a method that produces a reasonably smooth homemade almond milk, and (2) if we do, is the process simple enough to make it worth the effort. We've still got most of our initial batch of homemade almond butter to work with, so we'll definitely be making at least a few more batches, and perhaps by the time we're done we'll have come up with a method that's workable.

If we do, we'll have the ultimate ecofrugal plant-based milk: half the price of dairy milk, with practically no packaging. But even if we don't, it's good to know that we always have this DIY almond milk as a backup. Now if we're snowed up for days at a time and can't make it to the store, we can always produce a tolerable version of almond milk from ingredients we always have on hand — just so long as the power stays on, that is.

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.