It can be whipped up in only a few minutes and fulfills all oat milk-expectations. It is creamy, froths nicely, is great cold with cookies (or in this case, a thick slice of chocolate cake!), is perfect poured over granola, works well in baking, the list goes on.
One of the best parts about homemade oat milk is how sustainable it is. You probably know how hard it is to sustainably farm cow's milk because of one, they burp/fart so much methane, two, they have to eat so much stuff, and three, they use up a lot of fresh water.
While almond milk is a bit better than cow's milk, almonds require a lot of water to grow and their production usually involves harmful pollenating practices (read more about how growing almonds harms bees here).
Another popular plant based milk is soy milk, however, soy, while being lighter with water then almonds, still doesn't beat oats. Oats require less water to grow then most options and is farmed using 80% less land then cow's milk.
So, not only does oat milk taste delicious, it is also much more sustainable and environmentally friendly then other options.
My only issue with oat milk is that when you heat it up, it thickens and turns into oat goop. This should be expected because of how cooking oat meal and porridge works. However, the formation of goop can actually be used to our advantage to thicken dairy-free ice cream (you can read more about that, here).
Anyways, because when it is heated up the oat milk thickens and turns goopy, I highly recommend using very cold water when making the oat milk and consuming it in it's cold form (so maybe find a different milk for hot cocoa, coffee, tea, etc).
Ingredients
1 cup rolled oats
6 cups chilled water
splash of vanilla extract
Instructions
1. Combine all of the ingredients in a blender.
Blend on high for 20 seconds and then pour the milk into a french coffee press or a cheese cloth/nut milk bag. Press or squeeze the milk out, make sure to save the oat pulp/goop! Keep the oat milk in the fridge.
Wondering what to do with your oat pulp?
Check out these ideas;
- Chocolate Chip Oat Pulp Cookies (from Clean & Delicious)
- Oat Pulp bath or scalp rub (read more about oat's moisturizing powers here)
- Oat Pulp Pancakes (from The Pickle Jar)
Read more about the battle of the plant milks here
Very interesting