Home-made Oat Milk
Milk made at home in no longer than 15 minutes. What a time to be alive! For more on the nutrition behind plant-based milks, click here.
Song suggestions:
I Was Wrong - Arizona
Good Side In - The Japanese House
Ingredients: (makes 700ml oat milk. To make 1L, use 145g oat milk and follow the same method).
100g oats
750ml cold water
2 pitted dates (about 10-15g)
Pinch of salt, to taste
Method:
Remove the pits from the dates and blend them into the cold water. Blend for 20 seconds at a time, 3-4 times, until most of the dates are blended into the liquid. You’ll be left with a golden brown liquid, depending on the quality of your dates.
Add the oats and salt, and blend for 15-20 seconds. I have a NutriBullet 1000, which is relatively powerful. I know (from experience and research) that if I blend it for any longer than this, the oats will go all slimy. We’re not aiming for slimy oat milk here! Adjust times according to the strength of your blender (with a maximum overall blend time of no more than 30 seconds, I would say)
Pass through a nut-milk bag, squeezing gently until you’re left with the pulp in a bag.
Enjoy! Can be refrigerated for 2-3 days.
Note: many online recipes say you can just chuck everything all at once into the blender. Here’s why I disagree with this method: in a powerful blended, you can only blend oats for about 15/20 seconds before they start to go slimy and it takes longer than 15 seconds to completely blend dates into water. If you chuck everything in at the same time, you’ll only get partially blended dates in the final liquid and most of their residue will be left behind in your oat milk bag! We don’t want that! We want as much of their sweetness in the drink.
Top tip: I find I get the most liquid out of my oat milk if I strain it in two batches (somehow). I recommend you do the same.
Top tip: if you don’t have a nut-milk bag, use and old, clean t-shirt. Don’t squeeze it as hard though, as the mesh of a t-shirt is much looser than a nut-milk bag so bigger particles of oat may pass through a t-shirt that would otherwise be filtered out in a nut-milk bag).
A Bite Out of Life
Many of you may recognise the face below from previous ‘A Bite Out of Life’ articles and my Instagram. If you don’t, this is my wonderful Grandad, who has been caring for his yard ever since marrying my grandma (60 years ago). Their infamous orange trees, lemon trees, grapevines and more were all tended to by him and I always grew up seeing him as the groundsman of the house, something he always did with immense pride. If I think about how their homemade lemonade or orange juice tastes, compared to shop-bought, it’s immeasurably better, completely in another league. When you tend to things yourself and grow good quality ingredients, it’s always worth the background effort for how they taste. The bag of lemons on the right here were picked by my Grandad in an afternoon (and it didn’t even leave a dent in all the lemons left on the tree)! His food work always gave him an immense sense of purpose and mind does too. We did quite different things, but the principle is the same.
