I can hardly believe we’re up to week seven. I remember cycling down to the train station in those panicked few days before lockdown started wearing a woolly hat, and now here we are in ice cream eating weather. Thankfully, mildly alarmed Ciara packed some shorts into the tiny bag of clothes she took as she raced home from Cambridge, which looking back required quite the amount of foresight.
Things here are looking pretty much the same as they did in week 4. I’ve been gently pushing myself to try new things in the evenings and weekends as I always feel one thousand times better when I’ve done something other than watch eleventeen episodes of Brooklyn 99. While everyone else seems to be making sourdough however, if we’re all going to be more artisanal during lockdown I’ve chosen to make oat milk my homespun skill of choice. And I do say skill in the loosest sense of the word, because it turns out that making your own oat milk is ridiculously easy.
There are more recipes for oat milk out there than there are individual oats in a bowl of porridge, and I most definitely haven’t tried every single one of them. The beauty of oat milk is that it’s so straight forward that you don’t really need a recipe – so long as your proportions are roughly right, you’ll get something drinkable.
To make your own, YOU WILL NEED:
Oats
Water
A bowl and blender
A cheese cloth or muslin
METHOD:
(1) Take one mug of oats, and add 3 mugs of water. The size of the mug doesn’t matter, it’s just the proportions that need to be roughly right
(2) Blend for around 45 seconds
(3) Strain through your cheese cloth
(4) That’s it. That’s the recipe.
You can have a play around with the proportions and with adding extras like maple syrup, vanilla, and/or dates for extra sweetness. I really, really hate sweetened plant milks so can’t comment on what proportions of these things work, but generally recipes say 1-2 dates and 1tsp maple syrup per batch. I’d recommend playing around with the method a bit to find what works for you – if it’s going slimy, try blending it for less time or pre-soaking the oats and rinsing them (though it’s worth bearing in mind that some sources say this makes the sliminess worse).
You can use the oat pulp left in the bag for loads of different things. Mine’s been used it in overnight oats, mixed with coffee grounds to make a body scrub, and used to make this insanely good vegan donut recipe, pictured.
One of the best things about making home made oat milk (aside from making me feel wholesome) is that it’s has helped us solve one of the problems we’ve had since January, after we pretty much ditched dairy milk and switched to plant milks full time. All those tetra-packs have been the source of a fair amount of environmental guilt (tetra-packs, if you didn’t know, are an environmental whoopsie because they’re royal pain the arse to recycle- more on that here) – by buying oats from the bulk bin, we can make plant milk in a way that’s almost entirely waste free. And in a way that’s incredibly cheap, which is most welcome indeed (though it’s important to note that most commercial plant milks are fortified with things like B12 and Vitamin D, and your home-made oat milk won’t be). Next up is experimentation with chocolate oat milk, which, needless to say, I am very excited about.
As ever, hope you’re all keeping safe and well. I promise my next post will feature actual animals.
