A Swedish farmer using oats to make milk
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
And my personal experience with this Oatly milk, it tastes like hay. Which makes me wonder where this demand came from.
The milk actually works nicely in coffee, and their yogurt varieties are perfectly viable replacement for milk based ones. The crème fraiche can be used as is for many uses, but for some cold sauces/dips I add a bit of very high quality olive oil, and a touch of lemon and lime to bring the acidity up in a good way. With correct proportions it's very hard to tell that the resulting sauce/dip/etc was not made out of a milk based product.
My daughters best friend and her family have several food allergies and because of this I have tried most kinds of milk protein free and gluten free products.
The movement among some non allergic people away from ordinary milk and gluten containing flour have actually given them much better and cheaper option that they now also can get almost anywhere.
That said, I love oatmilk and it's now super common in third wave coffee places in London. It's thicker than regular milk and has a nice creamy taste. One of the head roasters I've spoken to at Grind group mentioned it works like this:
(people who like soy and almond milk)
(people who like cow and oat milk)Sounds unlikely. Source?
Maybe I just jumped the gun and assumed you were making some quack-ish comment that we're all having some kind of micro-allergy everytime we consume oats, when actually you were really just saying people are allergic to raw oats.
Apologies. I just had a similar convo with someone that said 'carbs are bad because inflammation' so that probably gave me a hair trigger.
My local coffee shop trialled Oatly and as someone who usually drinks soy or almond milk, it's a really nice alternative. Much easier to work with, and tastes better too.
My personal experience with the Oatly milk is absolutely the same. Looks like veganism is a thing in Sweden and provides enough demand for this business.
Sometimes I need a protein/fat/carbohydrate suspension with approximately the same viscosity as milk. The various veggie milks (rice, oat, soy, almond, and cashew) all fit the bill to different degrees in different situations. If I make my own veggie "milk" it usually tastes something like whatever I made it from, but stale and with a cloying chalky mouth-feel. Commercially available veggie milks often taste bad, but not nearly as bad as anything I've made in my blender.
There are a few reasons why people might prefer oat milk over the alternatives.
* Nut milks are more expensive, Cashew being the most milk-like but also the most expensive.
* Rice milk tastes like water and has very little appeal.
* Some people claim to be sensitive to soy and others are convinced that it causes gynecomastia (more likely it's the hops in your beer).
* Nut and soy milks curdle in acidic coffee and tea. This can be a problem in cooking too; I use both "milk" and lemon juice in my vegan scalloped potatoes. I don't know if this is the case with oat milk or not.
In my estimation, oat milk sits at the sweet spot on the milkiness-cost curve between cashew milk and rice milk. It's about as milky as almond milk while being cheaper. Like other vile liquids that people habituate themselves to (coffee), the taste for oat milk can be acquired. It may even be the case that 100 years from now, people will swill oat milk like wine and grate it according to the grassiness of its bouquet.
Partially because quite simply not everybody has that association. People have different tastes. Of all the milk alternatives I like the oat-based ones best, and I've tried quite a few (although I also find the smell of hay quite pleasant, which probably helps on a sub-conscious level).
Also, the motivation may lie elsewhere. For me, exploring alternatives to dairy was definitely based on trying to reduce my ecological footprint. However, I am lucky enough to immediately like the oat-based drinks.
I've also had recipes that used non-dairy milk as the base. None of these were cultured, so while they can taste good, they generally don't have any of the tang or sharpness of cheese. This can be fine if you're trying to make a cheese sauce but it doesn't cut it for something that's trying to be like solid cheese.
If you want to make some at home I highly recommend the cookbook Artisan Vegan Cheese by Miyoko Schinner (of Miyoko's Creamery). The recipes are actually fairly simple, though I think it takes practice to get a consistently excellent result, which is why I'm lazy and just buy the cheese from her company instead of making it myself.
You can definitely make yogurt from non-dairy milks, and AFAIK it's done with the same strain of bacteria. In the US, these are available at mainstream groceries (at least in Minneapolis where I live) as well as co-ops and Whole Foods. I've had yogurt based on on soy, almond, and coconut milk (and maybe others I'm forgetting). My favorite is probably Kite Hill's yogurt. That said, I'm not that into yogurt in general, so I rarely eat it.
It might be my Dutch privilege of growing up in the country-side close to a real cheese farm, but almost every vegan cheese I've tried here has a dissapointing "margarine" taste/texture - that weird watery feeling compared to real butter. I'm sure someone will figure how to recreate something resembling the missing taste/texture eventually though. (also to be clear: it doesn't have to taste like cheese, I just want it to taste in such a way that I don't miss it, and part of that is not tasting like margarine). But again, maybe it's an issue of knowledge not being wide-spread enough to create good local alternatives.
Miyoko's Creamery also makes a fantastic cultured butter that's based on cashews and coconut oil (but with no coconut flavor). It's very creamy and hard at room temperature, much like butter and completely unlike margarine.
To do this I paid a LOT of money for the best quality vegan 'parmesan'.
It was inedible and tasted like a rubber coconut.
Yogurt is basically milk with a bacteria that eats sugar added to it. You can do that with any product similar to milk it seems. Oatly produces an oat-based yogurt, and the Swedish market has yogurts based on (at least) soy and lupine as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennet
The lactose mostly ends up in the whey, so most lactose intolerant people do okay eating rennet cheeses (and so can eat things like pizza and so on).
It's popular among the vegans I know, and some of the better pizza restaurants (in SF) even offer it for vegan pizzas.
Now I'm curious to get some Oatly and try one of Miyoko's recipes with it.
But they aren't going to replace milk that we use in, say, the production of butter, cheese, casein, or lactose products.
I'd be curious to see what a pie chart of the end products from our milk production looks like.
There are excellent butter, yogurt, and cheese products made without dairy. The cheese is made from nuts, not plant-based milks.
The point I was trying to make is that replacing the milk sold largely for drinking probably doesn't do much of a dent in the industry demand for dairy.
To make a real impact you'd probably have to replace those uses (or get people to radically change the types of food they eat).
Or maybe you are just talking about "soy cheese"? I agree that pure tofu is pretty bland, but with various seasonings (I'm partial to Chili oil), it can be quite good.
It's not as obvious as, say, olive oil vs. canola oil, but it is distinguishable. I can imagine giving up butter in favor of margarine... but then I also doubt the half pound I go through per year has a major impact in the big picture.
As for cheese... I do eat tofu sometimes in place of meats, but don't see it as a good substitute for cheese, except for perhaps a very narrow selection of cheese varieties (perhaps paneer).
I've yet to find a soy substitute for a cheddar or brie. What I have had is soy ricotta, which is about 80% of the way to matching the real thing in terms of texture and about 50% there in terms of flavor. I have no doubt it will be done eventually, but we're still a _very_ long way from replacing a cheese lover's dairy consumption with alternatives.
Or they're not grossed out at all. They just make the rational decision to not consume dairy because of the water, energy and food consumption of the dairy/meat industry. Or because of the greenhouse gas emissions.
What are you saying, if you don't want to contribute to the things mentioned above, you shouldn't be allowed to drink anything that remotely resembles cow milk?
That's exactly why it's milk actually. Just like coconut milk, which has existed forever, milk of magnesia which has existed since 1875, and soy milk which has been widely consumed since the 1800s.
Oat milk is not milk. But it's milk. English has no problem with that. Pizza pie is not pie. Boot camp is not camp. A house boat is not a boat. We understand each other just fine. You add a word to another word and you get a third word that's unique from both of its parts.
There's a similar push happening in Australia.
BTW, I think pizza is only called 'pizza pie' in the US? And a house boat is definitely a boat if it floats.
I can't explain it, but milk is just gross to me. I eat almost every other dairy product (okay, I'm not a fan of something too fermented, like kefir, ayran and such), but plain milk is psychologically repulsive. Maybe it's because my grandma had a cow when I was a child, and seeing milk come out of a cow was disgusting. Processed dairy products are kind of too far removed from a cow in my mind, so they're okay. Maybe it's the smell of country milk. I don't like homemade country cheeses because of the smell as well. For this reason I love oatly, and almond and coconut milks. Soy milk is fine too. I can also dring flavored milks or coffee with milk (although I prefer it black). I've only met one other person like this in my life, and it felt very validating that I'm not alone in this.
As for why, it's the same reason people make substitutes for a lot of things. I have coeliac disease and cannot eat any gluten-containing bread, so I make substitutes using various gums and binders to replace the gluten. Even though it isn't the same as a gluten-containing bread it's still useful.
Same goes for alternative milks. An emulsion of fats and water is a useful substance even if it doesn't come from an animal. It binds tannins in tea and coffee and has a nicer mouth-feel than plain water in breakfast cereals.
Not sure what the original etymology of "Milk" but it seems to have evolved from just referring to mammary liquids to liquids of a smooth, translucent or opaque consistency, e.g. Milk of Magnesia.
I always use dairy milk for coffee and found it odd why people would use soy or almond milk. I guess both have fat; do plant fats react to coffee in the same way that dairy fats do?
Anyway, I pour almond milk on cereal because I like cereal. It probably wouldn't be great on fruit loops, but it works nicely with granola and other nut based cereals.
A good discussion about this: https://cooking.stackexchange.com/a/76006
I thought only diets and lifestyle can be healthy, regardless of what a single ingredient can do.
Also, if it is vegetable oil, how come there's protein in it? I thought oil is just fat? There's 4 grams of protein in 100mL of soy/oat milk (about the same as cow breast milk). Almonds on the other hand are a big scam with only 0.x protein, water with some flavour.
There are definitely healthy fats and unhealthy ones, for example everyone can agree trans fats are in the latter category. The perfect fatty acid profile is a matter for debate but it's definitely possible to isolate bad ingredients by a variety of means (populational studies, etc). It's not easy though, if it were then there wouldn't be so much debate in this space.
"[We] have known about the harms of fatty acid imbalance, and an excess of omega-6, for a long time. So much so that sunflower oil in the US was 'upgraded' through selective breeding to produce a high-oleic-acid variety (high monounsaturated fatty acid) that now prevails, and AVOIDS the potential harms noted in this paper. The same thing is now being done to soybean oil, and the high monounsaturated fatty acid version of that will soon replace the old variety.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2016/04/13/the-ani...
(EDIT: And the oil in Oatly happens to be rapeseed oil.)
(EDIT2: And the oil in almond milk is almond oil...)
There is very little evidence to support that consuming vegetable oils as a replacement for animal fats results in better health.
She has also done a TED talk that gives a very quick summary of the book:
That Wikipedia article doesn't really support your contention that vegetable oils are healthy and animal fats are unhealthy. That is, at the very least, a gross simplification. In my opinion, the research is not yet good enough to draw any such definitive conclusion.
Vegetable oils have been a large part of the human diet for less than 100 years, but have been progressively increasingly consumed by western populations, especially in the U.S. In that time overall cardiovascular health has trended in what direction?
Anyway, this might all be a sideshow to the general reduction in calories being derived from fat in general. The replacement of calories from fat with calories from carbohydrates seems particularly harmful when taken to an extreme, especially for women.
But, again, my main contention is that the evidence is at best preliminary, based on observational studies which cannot show cause and effect, and often poorly controlled and based on small numbers of participants. The largest, best controlled studies often don't support the mainstream view. It's simply not scientifically settled.
That said, I find Oatly less watery and much less sweet than the last oat milk I remember trying. It has a darker greenish-gray color than other plant milks (maybe from the added algae?). It still tastes like oats (though less than others) and not like milk. In a blind tasting, I think I would prefer it to other oat and similar milks because of the more rounded, less earthy and less sweet taste than the others I have had.
Overall, it's better than the competition, but it won't become something I will buy regularly (as opposed to cow's milk).
Given that oat milk cuts out the middleman (middlecow?), should this not be cheaper anyway, or are there scale effects preventing it from reaching price parity?
What do we do with waste from the manufacture of oat beverages?
We work as much for sustainable consumption of food as for a sustainable production of these products. Regarding the consumption of food, it is indisputable that a sustainable diet for the future contains far fewer animal products than we eat today, there is even a great unanimity on this subject in all sciences of this disciplined. In sustainable food production, we believe that the crops of the future will be much more than they are today, focusing directly on food rather than animal feed.
Any production of food products, even based on vegetable raw materials, also generates waste. It is not always possible to use the entire raw material in the final product. In the case of oat beverages, we remove some of the insoluble fiber which results in a loss of nutrients, which are extracted with the insoluble fraction. Efforts to achieve sustainable food production are largely based on sobriety in the use of resources. Regarding waste, we believe that their most sustainable management is to exploit the remaining food and energy in the form of food by making them the ingredients of animal fodder that are still high. All this to benefit from the food produced. In the next step, when all the food has been used as fodder, the final waste is biogas.
It's not widely known in Australia (to us Anglos) but a Mexican friend supplied me with some and it tasted better than the almond or soy substitutes I've had!
I don't know about how has the term evolved in the English speaking word, but no one in Spain will refer to horchata as milk, nor do we use it as a milk replacement (nobody would mix it with coffee, for example). Also we don't use the term as a generic word for vegetal milk at all. Milk and horchata don't really have anything in common aside from being white drinkable liquids.
The vegan milks sold downunder taste like sugary, oily, porridge liquid. My soy milk phase ended when I couldn't finish a 1L carton before it turned into a gloopy mess.
You would be surprised by how many people are unaware of how milk is produced. Only a pregnant female cow can produce milk [Edit: as BenjiWiebe correctly states below, cows lactate after they give birth). So a female dairy cow will spend most of her adult life in a pregnant state. Once she gives birth, she is separated from her calf usually within a few hours (sometimes she'll be together with her offspring for 24 hours, but never more than that).
Then she'll be artificially inseminated again (normally within 3 months of giving birth) so she can start producing milk again. And so the cycle repeats.
The reason milk is so cheap (at least in Europe) is because we aren't prepared to pay for higher welfare conditions. We say we care for farm welfare, but our behaviour shows otherwise. Maybe we care a little bit, but we care even more for cheap prices. (And yes, I confess I am as guilty as the rest of us).
In many European countries, increasing numbers of dairy cows spend their entire lives indoors ("zero grazing"). For example, Germany is the EU's largest milk producer and the majority of dairy cows spend their entire lives indoors with no access to outdoor pasture. This is perfectly legal under EU regulations.
Also note that 20% (according to some random source) of beef production comes from former dairy cows. If you consider meat a byproduct of cow milk then cow milk is saving us from some of the environmental impact of beef production.
(FWIW I don't drink animal milk.)
The manufacturing process involves grinding almonds, oats, etc, into a very fine particulate powder, mixing it into water.
Then adding in all things necessary to keep it in suspension, and making it drinkable (try "almond milk" without the sugar and see how long it takes you to regurgitate it back out).
Almond-milk wasn't even selling until they placed it into the refrigerated section of the store next to real milk - to confuse the buyers with what it actually was-not.
It is likely that most consumers think the manufacturers press or squeeze the almonds to get at its "milk", and have no idea they are just drinking a few grams of powdered almonds.
Regular cow's milk is around 5% sugar as lactose (I think 4.8% is the typically standardised amount). Unsweetened almond milk has negligible sugar.