Day 1 - Experimenting with Non-Dairy Milks - Oat Milk

Oat Milk - I'm starting with Oat Milk because I have oats in my cupboard already and I know that it's an easy place to start and doesn't require a nut bag.  Tomorrow is shopping day and I'll buy a nut bag then, along with the groceries I need for experimentation week.  My husband isn't convinced that I can make non dairy cheeses for significantly less than it costs to buy their dairy counterpart so I'm keeping careful track of exactly what each recipe costs, the family's reaction to it and how it rates against its dairy counterpart.  I have to be honest, a lot of the time when I hear vegans rave over how much a vegan equivalent tastes exactly like the original I start wondering how long it's been since that person actually had the original.  I think my omnivore family will probably be a much better judge and the bar is going to be a lot higher for them.

One of the things my husband is really struggling with giving up is his non-dairy flavored creamer.  It's basically edible oil and sugar and as he's recovering from a heart attack I've been on his case to switch to black coffee.  Unfortunately all the nagging in the world has not made a convert out of him so I've decided to try coming up with a recipe for a non-dairy creamer that we can both live with.  I don't have high hopes for it working out with oat milk, but we've got to start somewhere.

So here's how I made my oat milk:

3 cups oats
water

Soak oats in water for 30 mins (about double the amount of water to oats.)
Strain.
Add 8 cups of fresh water and run through a blender.  Strain through a fine metal sieve.  I strained it an extra 2 times just to be thorough.

Result:
I took 2 cups of the oat milk added two cinnamon sticks a tsp of vanilla and 1/3 of a cup of sugar and simmered it for about 5 minutes.  Surprisingly I had to stir constantly as the milk thickened significantly when heated.
I added the cream to a cup of black coffee and the first thing I noticed was that it didn't color the coffee almost at all.  It still looked like a cup of black coffee.  My husband was not a big fan of this cream, which I was expecting.  Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained.  On the other hand the plain mild tasted pretty decent when drunk by itself.  I'm going to keep trying but I think oatmilk would be excellent as a baking and cooking milk, and not bad as a cereal and smoothie milk.  And when it comes to cost, it cannot be beat!!

Results:

Coffee cream - NO
Drinking and Cereal Milk - Pretty good.  7/10
Cooking and Baking Ingredient - 9/10

Cost:

After looking around online at my local stores I found I can get oats for $1.89 per kg.
Each cup of oats is about 90 g

Oats - $0.51
Water - $0.00

2 L of Oatmilk - $0.51