Vegan Milk

For months now I have been trying to find full-fat coconut milk in my local shops and no luck. Then I saw this video from food scientist Rosemary Trout about vegan milk. Wow I did not know one can make potato milk. If only Matt Damon's character in the movie "The Martian" knew. Anyone up for making pistachio or pea milk ice cream?

I have made milk from rice.

Every time I hear the commercial for plant-based milk I want to know which plant or plants this is made from.

I make almond, pumpkin, sunflower, hazelnut and sesame milks:) ( lol not together… except for hazelnut and sesame and chocolate= mocha… got the basis for a lot of these ideas from Ani Phyo’s recipe book
Add a little chia and it’s a milk shake. A banana, almonds and spices= banana nut bread milk, etc:)
My daughter loves them:)
If I wasn’t raw I’d probably make with cooked rice:) horchata!

Don't think I'd go for commercial pea, potato, or banana milk, in particular.  Isolated proteins kinda creep me out.

I'm surprised she didn't mention sunflower milk. That's one I make all the time. I've also made millet milk, which wasn't mentioned. I haven't made 100% poppy or pumpkin seed milk, but I'll mix it in with sunflower for a different flavour. I do that with walnut, too, so I don't have to shell so many 😏

My oops I didn't plan ahead milk is tahini shaken up in a jar with water.

The best milk I've made is from chufa (tigernut) which I grew. Tasted like coconut milk. In Spain they make chufa horchata.

So delicious!

T Blankinship wrote:For months now I have been trying to find full-fat coconut milk in my local shops and no luck. Then I saw this video from food scientist Rosemary Trout about vegan milk. Wow I did not know one can make potato milk. If only Matt Damon's character in the movie "The Martian" knew. Anyone up for making pistachio or pea milk ice cream?

If anyone is looking into this 2 years later (or later than that), I can offer this advice: look for full fat coconut milk in a can in the international sections of supermarkets, or in small markets that carry foods from other cultures besides North American. It will be with things like Goya beans or Asian foods because canned coconut milk is used in recipes as a type of cream in places like Asia, South & Central America, and places where coconuts are abundant. It is very thick, sometimes needing to be scraped out of the can, particularly when it's called "coconut cream". This is an entirely different product than coconut milk that is meant for drinking, such as in the quart sized boxes found with almond milk, soy milk, etc. I've used canned coconut cream/milk in recipes and it does indeed hold up very well when a creamy thickness is needed.
I also used it to make ice cream, and boy, was it good! Just as creamy as full fat dairy ice cream.

And thanks, OP, for that video! I keep saying I'm going to make my own nut milk. I was thinking of mixing a few types, so that no one flavor is noticeable.

I haven't watched the video, but this discussion left me wondering, does no-one make soya milk?  Or maybe it's so common that there was no need to mention it.  I've made it once, on the way to making tofu.  Not impressed, so not on the menu since.
Supermarkets here sell all sorts of "milks" including oat, almond, rice soy and coconut - the latter is really easy to make.  Asian cookbooks will probably have a "how to".

Jill Dyer wrote:I haven't watched the video, but this discussion left me wondering, does no-one make soya milk?  Or maybe it's so common that there was no need to mention it.  I've made it once, on the way to making tofu.  Not impressed, so not on the menu since.
Supermarkets here sell all sorts of "milks" including oat, almond, rice soy and coconut - the latter is really easy to make.  Asian cookbooks will probably have a "how to".

Soy milk is in the video. If you start playing it and pause right away, you can hover over the play bar and text will appear saying which nut milk she's talking about, so you can just click on the part you want. There's a typo though; it says "soy mick".

I used to drink soy milk a lot years ago, when the other nut milks weren't as popular yet and were more expensive. Soy milk used to be the cheapest. I think I ended up feeling like it became a tired, boring, older milk alternative, but maybe I'll try it again now & then.

As for making our own non-dairy milks, I suppose a big factor might be how easy or economical it is to obtain the particular nuts. I've never dealt with a whole coconut before, so in my imagination I would think it'd be one of the most difficult milks to make! I guess I should consider this when deciding which trees to plant, so maybe I can have a "milk tree"! In 5b I won't be able to grow coconuts or almonds anyway. But if we're buying nuts, oats, rice, or whatever, for milk-making, the prices of those things can vary hugely! If I need to be economical I'd probably go for brown rice or oats.

Thanks Kim - not enough hours in the day to watch every video!
Finally found the recipe for coconut milk:-  from The Complete Asian Cookbook by Charmaine Solomon - I've had this one for at least 40 years, it's well thumbed,  and the cover has given way.  Needless to say - I'm a devotee.
You will need:  2 cups of desiccated coconut to 2-1/2 cups of hot water.   Pop both into a blender, cover and blend for 30 seconds then strain contents through a fine sieve or a piece of muslin (I use a handkerchief kept for the purpose).  Squeeze out all the moisture.  This gives about 1-1.2 cups of thick coconut milk.
Return the coconut to the blender with a further 2-1/2 cups of hot water and repeat as above.  Gives about 2 cups of thin coconut milk.
Can also be done by hand - let the water cool a bit then give the coconut a good squeezing and proceed as above.  Recipes can call for one or both types of extractions;  I've never tried, but it probably freezes OK if necessary.
For T. Blankinship - the first extraction is probably what you need, as if it's left to stand the fat rises to the top.  I'm using a packaged dried coconut milk at the moment - just add water, and I can have as much as I need for my recipe.

having made every kind of milk you could probably imagine....
i think soy is one of the more complicated ones. i had a fancy pantsy soymilk maker at one point, which was awesome since soymilk almost always involves burning a pan.
Something like peanut or sesame, where you just soak and blend and strain, or banana or melon seed, where just blend, is significantly easier.
Most don't store very well, which is why I explored many different kinds of milk. If I'm making it every other day, I need to have lots of options.

As for which is best, it certainly depends on the application and what you expect from it. I often make coconut milk (from coconuts and water) but I wouldn't want to drink a glass of it straight. It's good for cooking, and freezes well enough, if you're going to cook with it.

(take the meat out of the coconut, blend it with water, strain it out. easy peasy)
Half a coconut worth of meat per full blender jar is about right.
Don't expect it to be "cream of coconut" creamy- that takes many, many coconuts!

Lately I'm being more observant of omega 6/3 ratio in my fatty acid intake and have been looking more at flax- and hempseed-milks.  We drink a lot of commercial oat milk as well.  Home-brew of both oat and flax milk can be accompanied by the slime factor present in both from carbohydrate complexes, but overnight incubation of the finished milk with some digestive enzymes seems to help with this.  Will continue experimenting with different enzyme sources to see which is the best, but welcome comments from others on solving this issue in the home kitchen.  Thanks!

John Weiland wrote:Home-brew of both oat and flax milk can be accompanied by the slime factor present in both from carbohydrate complexes, but overnight incubation of the finished milk with some digestive enzymes seems to help with this.  Will continue experimenting with different enzyme sources to see which is the best, but welcome comments from others on solving this issue in the home kitchen.  Thanks!

Any update on the enzymes for flax?

I have been making milks for regularly for many years (sunflower, cashew, almond, soy) mostly for baking and cooking, and have been venturing into making ice cream. I made a peanut milk for peanut butter and banana ice cream and it was very good! I used a combo of oat/cashew and it just tasted like oatmeal ice cream, coconut milk just made it taste like our coconut, and straight cashew was just too creamy/strong despite add-ins. So now trying more combinations and am interested in flax!

I'm delighted to have tiger nuts / chufa growing fairly well for me, as I adored the chufa horchata I had about 10 years ago.

I need to research if enzymes are recommended.

Image: Chufa sedge plants growing.

I'm no fun, I like cocanut milk in curry, almond milk can taste okay to me in coffee or tea, oat milk can taste okay to me in coffee, but that's it so far for plant-based for me on milk.

Steffani Rideau wrote:

John Weiland wrote:Home-brew of both oat and flax milk can be accompanied by the slime factor present in both from carbohydrate complexes, but overnight incubation of the finished milk with some digestive enzymes seems to help with this.  Will continue experimenting with different enzyme sources to see which is the best, but welcome comments from others on solving this issue in the home kitchen.  Thanks!

Any update on the enzymes for flax?

I have been making milks for regularly for many years (sunflower, cashew, almond, soy) mostly for baking and cooking, and have been venturing into making ice cream. I made a peanut milk for peanut butter and banana ice cream and it was very good! I used a combo of oat/cashew and it just tasted like oatmeal ice cream, coconut milk just made it taste like our coconut, and straight cashew was just too creamy/strong despite add-ins. So now trying more combinations and am interested in flax!

I have not had the chance yet to try this with flax but hope to do so in the fall when in the kitchen more.  I do still need to adjust my oatmilk recipe....last batch probably was too concentrated on amount of oats used and the bitterness from overblending came through.  But the slime reduction from the enzyme mix worked well, usually added as a last step in preparation and then allowed to sit overnight in the fridge.  Regionally, oat, flax, and sunflower all are fairly common crops in North Dakota and it's nice to know that one can locally-source organically-produced seed of these.  Liked the idea of peanut milk ice cream!  And I like using bananas or banana chips as well for certain flavors and end-product texturing.  I hope to come back when flaxmilk has been tried and will let you know.....   Good luck!

I think that the best plant milk I have had is oat milk.

I have never had this but I have heard that hickory nuts were traditionally made into a nut milk. This could be the zone 5 milk tree!

There are whole swaths of wild chufa but their tubers are much smaller. Maybe Bolboschoenus fluviatilis could work as well since their tubers are much bigger than either.

Ooo! "Kanuchi" or "Ganvtsi"

"Cherokee Nation .. language specialists David Crawler and Phyllis Sixkiller explained the kanuchi process first in Cherokee, then in English.

"How to prepare: Gather hickory nuts when they fall from the trees after the first frost.

" .. dry the hickory nuts in a box, basket or other container. .. after two weeks ..

"Once the nuts are dried, they are cracked open with a rock. ..

"Cracked hickory nuts are sifted and strained. ..

"You see the nuts are falling and the hulls are staying in here," Sixkiller said. "There should be more nuts than hulls."

"Traditionally, the nuts are then placed in a mortar, or kanonv in Cherokee, where they are mashed into an oily paste with a stick. ..

"The nut meat is then formed into a ball roughly the size of a baseball. ..

"The kanuchi ball is heated in water until it dissolves, then a finer strainer is used to remove remaining hulls. .."

https://www.cherokeephoenix.org/news/cherokee-eats-kanuchi/article_b856db8f-c297-5c4b-83a5-01a2a0400df0.html