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.
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.
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)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.
Now I'm curious to get some Oatly and try one of Miyoko's recipes with it.
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.
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.