How thick is it? Other plant "milks" I've tried (almond, rice, soy) seem to resemble skim milk in texture, and you have to get something labeled "creamer" to find a consistency that resembles 2%, let alone whole milk.
The standard variant is pretty close to whole milk in taste/texture, although it has a slight "graininess" to it. It's definitely fuller than any rice or soy product I've tried.
A non-creamer plant based milk with a thicker texture is Califia Farms Toasted Coconut Almond Milk, highlights 0 grams of sugar, 50% more calcium than milk and 45 calories/cup.
They actually have a special coffee-version that is fairly thick and less prone to coagulation (a common problem with dairy alternatives). It's actually one of the more popular ones I think, it's always sold out in my local supermarket.
Maybe this differs per country, but most soy milks, almond milks, rice milks, etc sold here in the Netherlands are sweetened, making them taste like garbage in my opinion. However, at least both soy milk and almond milk is also readily available in an unsweetened variant. Look out for that, it tastes a lot better. I'm personally particularly fond of the unsweetened almond milk, nearly any brand really.
The French version of their FAQ at http://www.oatly.com/faq/ (but not other language versions, for whatever reason) says that they feed whatever is left to animals. Here is the whole question ran through Google Translate:
What do we do with waste from the manufacture of oat beverages?
We work as much for sustainable consumption of food as for a sustainable production of these products. Regarding the consumption of food, it is indisputable that a sustainable diet for the future contains far fewer animal products than we eat today, there is even a great unanimity on this subject in all sciences of this disciplined. In sustainable food production, we believe that the crops of the future will be much more than they are today, focusing directly on food rather than animal feed.
Any production of food products, even based on vegetable raw materials, also generates waste. It is not always possible to use the entire raw material in the final product. In the case of oat beverages, we remove some of the insoluble fiber which results in a loss of nutrients, which are extracted with the insoluble fraction. Efforts to achieve sustainable food production are largely based on sobriety in the use of resources. Regarding waste, we believe that their most sustainable management is to exploit the remaining food and energy in the form of food by making them the ingredients of animal fodder that are still high. All this to benefit from the food produced. In the next step, when all the food has been used as fodder, the final waste is biogas.
For the vast majority of uses, butter can be replaced by vegetable-based shortenings like margarine. There is non-dairy (usually soy-based) cheese, too. Not that either of those tastes remotely as good as the dairy-based versions, but I can imagine it's possible to improve on them with concerted effort.
I have never noticed a difference in taste between butter and margarine, and I have eaten both with a spoon after coming home to an otherwise empty fridge. It's just fat.
Or maybe you are just talking about "soy cheese"? I agree that pure tofu is pretty bland, but with various seasonings (I'm partial to Chili oil), it can be quite good.
To my palate, butter tends to be a little bit sweeter and less oily than margarine. It tastes lighter and richer.
It's not as obvious as, say, olive oil vs. canola oil, but it is distinguishable. I can imagine giving up butter in favor of margarine... but then I also doubt the half pound I go through per year has a major impact in the big picture.
As for cheese... I do eat tofu sometimes in place of meats, but don't see it as a good substitute for cheese, except for perhaps a very narrow selection of cheese varieties (perhaps paneer).
I've yet to find a soy substitute for a cheddar or brie. What I have had is soy ricotta, which is about 80% of the way to matching the real thing in terms of texture and about 50% there in terms of flavor. I have no doubt it will be done eventually, but we're still a _very_ long way from replacing a cheese lover's dairy consumption with alternatives.
Agreed. I'm not trying to say that non-animal versions of those things aren't possible.
The point I was trying to make is that replacing the milk sold largely for drinking probably doesn't do much of a dent in the industry demand for dairy.
To make a real impact you'd probably have to replace those uses (or get people to radically change the types of food they eat).
Oat based creme fraiche from Oatly tastes fine. I prefer cow milk, but do replace some dairy products with oat based where it doesn't have to taste 100% like it "used to".
From what it looks like reading swedish news over the years, there is no money in running a traditional farm, german milk is cheaper, danish meat is cheaper and so on. I'm sure that's the main reason a farmer would go for something like this, rather than for saving the planet or whatever.
And my personal experience with this Oatly milk, it tastes like hay. Which makes me wonder where this demand came from.
These oat-based products are popular because allergies are common. People allergic to milk and/or soy proteins can drink this milk, eat this ice-cream etc
Everyone is allergic to oats (lectins) if they aren't cooked for a lot longer than the packages say. They easily cause an immune reaction that can have a (standard for infections) 3 day lag.
I just found this article that seems to sum up my skepticism, basically it says "raw beans" can cause lectin-poisoning, not all lectins even seem to be harmful, some even seem beneficial, but some quack nutritionists are blowing "lectin-free" up into the next "gluten-free" fad: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/04/the-next-...
I eat a lot of cooked beans (and oats, sometimes) - lectins and other toxins are how plants defend their seed (etc, but seeds are obviously critical for reproduction.) Toxins are quite common in foods, and we deal with most of them well, even raw. Cooking was a massive advance for homo sapiens because it destroys most of these toxins, breaking up large molecules in general. Some plants have more durable toxins than others. Oats are at one extreme end of the spectrum, in good part because seeds are usually small and easier to heavily defend than, say, a root such as a carrot. It's that simple.
So people might be allergic to raw oats, but almost no-one ever buys/consumes raw oats right?
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.
But why would you then drink some product that tastes nothing like real milk? Just because it is white, sweetish and marketing people called it "<something> milk"?
Two broad alternatives: because it's the best substitute ("somewhat like milk in some way"), or because it's good. It's not like "milk" in "<something> milk" has to refer to the taste of, or to cow's milk at all.
I agree Oatly tastes nothing like cow milk, and I'm not allergic to cow milk, and I dislike Bonsoy and most popular brands of soy milk.
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)
I only buy Swedish pork. It has reasonable price. But I always buy Australian beef when I want a steak. It has so much better price to quality ratio.
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.
Veganism is definitely a big thing, my Danish neighbour told me when he was living there people looked at him weirdly when he showed up with meat for BBQs.
> Which makes me wonder where this demand came from.
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.
I don't know about oat milk specifically, but I've had yogurts made from soy, coconut and almond milk, and cheese made from almond milk and cashew milk. The yogurt is generally good if you like the base flavor of the kind of milk. The cheese is somewhat uneven in quality, with some being aggressively bland and others being pretty tasty. The best nutmilk cheeses I've found are Heidi Ho and Miyoko's Creamery.
Now I'm curious to get some Oatly and try one of Miyoko's recipes with it.
Cheese in the traditional way, probably not. I think it relies on a chemical reaction that's fairly unique to lactose (and lactose is, as far as I now, a sugar unique to milk). At least I haven't seen or heard of anyone doing it (except a few biotech firms that are explicitly working on novel ways of achieving similar chemical reactions). If such a product exists it's really badly marketed (or very low volume), because I know many vegans that would pay a high premium for such a product.
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.
Isn't cheese also produced using bacterial reactions that consume the sugars and form solids from the protein? I can imagine developing strains of bacteria that could live off a different variety of sugar. The difference in proteins present in cow's milk vs. vegetable milks seems like it would present a greater obstacle.
There is cultured vegan cheese, but it is a fairly premium product that doesn't get a lot of mass distribution. There's a recipe book for it called Artisan Vegan Cheese, and the woman who wrote it sells cultured vegan cheese and butter on her website and in upscale grocers like Whole Foods.
Canada-based Daiya makes a number of plant-based dairy-free cheese- alternatives, in a variety of forms, not just blocks but yoghurt and boxed mac-and-cheese.
It's popular among the vegans I know, and some of the better pizza restaurants (in SF) even offer it for vegan pizzas.
Daiya, like all vegan cheese producers I've heard of, use a very different process to achieve something similar to cheese. The end result is very good (I've tried it) but the original comment I replied to asked if you could use plant-based milk for making cheese, and I don't think Daiya's production process uses plant-based milk in that sense.
In my experience, the best non-dairy cheeses are made from culturing nuts. Miyoko's Creamery and Punk Rawk Labs in the US both use cashews (and sometimes include other nuts) as the base, then culture them. They both taste fantastic to me, though as a 20+ year vegan I cannot compare them to dairy cheese.
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.
I really hate to say this, but for me the vegan cheeses are not "there yet" - or at least the ones sold locally in Stockholm. Which I think is a real issue with this kind of stuff - from living between countries I've noticed for example that the Netherlands has much better meat replacements, but Sweden has the better milk replacements, and I don't think the local vegan cheeses are made the way you describe.
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.
Yeah, I have no idea what's available in Europe. If what you've tried is not based on cultured nuts, I'd assume it's not very good.
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.
The demand come from many sources, some thinks milk is unhealthy, some have allergies, some thing it's unethical to keep animals in capture, and some actually prefer it to ordinary milk.
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.
Sweden has terrible soil. Rock with a thin layer of sandy earth on top. Only Skåne, the southernmost part, sustains really productive farming, which is probably the main reason the Swedes fought a series of succesful wars in the seventeenth century to grab it from neighbouring Denmark.
Also why Swedish farmers decamped for North America in record numbers in the second part of the eighteen hundreds. About a quarter of the population emigrated.
To this day, Sweden cannot feed itself - about halt its consumed foodstuff must be imported. Contrast the much smaller Denmark - sans Skåne - which is self-sustainable in that particular regard. No rocks, plenty of soil.
I absolutely loved the taste of Oatly milk when I could get it here, briefly. Now I'm back to goat's milk. Also very good, but not available in storable form that I know of.
I can confirm on the high demand for this stuff. In addition, gluten-free, low-lactose, lactose-free, "super berries", raw food, are all quite popular here in Sweden. But with these trends come unreasonably high prices, it is getting quite crazy. Berries that have been found in swedish forests since forever and nobody cared about are picked up, branded as "super berries", put in fancy packaging and sold for insane prices... and people buy it. With milk substitutes, 1 liter of oatmilk being 90% water and 10% oat can cost you around $2.. oat already being ridiculously cheap otherwise (you can find it at $0.8 per kilo). So I'm making my own (easy) at $0.2 per liter :)
> And my personal experience with this Oatly milk, it tastes like hay. Which makes me wonder where this demand came from.
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.
I'm a vegan. I don't drink milk, ever. It's not about ethics or health or virtue signaling anymore: I've been vegan so long that I can't comfortably digest meat or milk and I can't stand the taste either.
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.
I dont think this will be adopted broadly unless it matches the price of real milk.
Given that oat milk cuts out the middleman (middlecow?), should this not be cheaper anyway, or are there scale effects preventing it from reaching price parity?
It seems to have seen widespread adoption in Norway already (probably due to the large and still growing vegetarian market). The non-cow options are all more expensive than cow milk, but that doesn't seem to make much of a difference.
The only problem with oat and almond milk is that they're mostly a suspension of cheap vegetable oil in water. Vegetable oils like sunflower oil aren't healthy.
Is there a way to measure healthiness of a single ingredient? I didn't find anything allowing me to label stuff as healthy or unhealthy. At least not scientific. I do not even think there's a scientific definition of healthiness of one single ingredient. I guess by your definition (vegetable oils increasing risk of some cardiovascular diseases) makes all meat, animal breast milk, eggs unhealthy.
I thought only diets and lifestyle can be healthy, regardless of what a single ingredient can do.
Also, if it is vegetable oil, how come there's protein in it? I thought oil is just fat? There's 4 grams of protein in 100mL of soy/oat milk (about the same as cow breast milk). Almonds on the other hand are a big scam with only 0.x protein, water with some flavour.
Industrially produced seed oils are thought to be unhealthy due to an over-abundance of Omega 6. But some regulatory authorities still cling to the decades-old wisdom that basically boils down to avoiding saturated fat at all costs, so they'll recommend vegetable oils over animal products.
There are definitely healthy fats and unhealthy ones, for example everyone can agree trans fats are in the latter category. The perfect fatty acid profile is a matter for debate but it's definitely possible to isolate bad ingredients by a variety of means (populational studies, etc). It's not easy though, if it were then there wouldn't be so much debate in this space.
If you're afraid of consuming too much Omega 6, choose oils with more Omega 3 such as flaxseed and rapeseed. Also:
"[We] have known about the harms of fatty acid imbalance, and an excess of omega-6, for a long time. So much so that sunflower oil in the US was 'upgraded' through selective breeding to produce a high-oleic-acid variety (high monounsaturated fatty acid) that now prevails, and AVOIDS the potential harms noted in this paper. The same thing is now being done to soybean oil, and the high monounsaturated fatty acid version of that will soon replace the old variety.”https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2016/04/13/the-ani...
I'm not qualified to conduct a scientific literary review on this topic, but I did provide a reference that is based on the official dietary recommendations as a start.
There is an excellent book written by a science journalist who spent 10 years doing a deep dive on the best available scientific evidence surrounding dietary fats. It explains why it is so difficult to find high-quality evidence for anything in nutrition science and, having been written by a journalist, it also does a decent job of investigating the history and politics that have coloured diet advice over the last century or so.
I'd rather not believe the picture painted by one book author as opposed to Wikipedia and "World Health Organization,[1] the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Medicine,[2] the American Dietetic Association,[3] the Dietitians of Canada,[3] the British Dietetic Association,[4] American Heart Association,[5] the British Heart Foundation,[6] the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada,[7] the World Heart Federation,[8] the British National Health Service,[9] the United States Food and Drug Administration,[10] and the European Food Safety Authority.[11]"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat_and_cardiovasc...
That Wikipedia article doesn't really support your contention that vegetable oils are healthy and animal fats are unhealthy. That is, at the very least, a gross simplification. In my opinion, the research is not yet good enough to draw any such definitive conclusion.
Vegetable oils have been a large part of the human diet for less than 100 years, but have been progressively increasingly consumed by western populations, especially in the U.S. In that time overall cardiovascular health has trended in what direction?
Anyway, this might all be a sideshow to the general reduction in calories being derived from fat in general. The replacement of calories from fat with calories from carbohydrates seems particularly harmful when taken to an extreme, especially for women.
But, again, my main contention is that the evidence is at best preliminary, based on observational studies which cannot show cause and effect, and often poorly controlled and based on small numbers of participants. The largest, best controlled studies often don't support the mainstream view. It's simply not scientifically settled.
For what it's worth, as someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s when the mainstream nutrition advice, supported by many of the organizations you've listed, was "eat lots of bread and pasta!" and "Fat is bad for you!" and "Stay away from eggs!", I'm more interested in what the actual underlying studies say, and how they were conducted, than any summarized "advice" coming from these organizations.
Most almond milk I see is just almonds and water. I've seen mystery "high protein nut milk" products that match what you describe but they're in the minority.
Surprised by the hype in this thread, I was wondering the same, so I went out and bought some. I've had oat and other grain milks before, and I'm not a fan nor an expert. Also, I didn't do a direct comparison with another oat milk.
That said, I find Oatly less watery and much less sweet than the last oat milk I remember trying. It has a darker greenish-gray color than other plant milks (maybe from the added algae?). It still tastes like oats (though less than others) and not like milk. In a blind tasting, I think I would prefer it to other oat and similar milks because of the more rounded, less earthy and less sweet taste than the others I have had.
Overall, it's better than the competition, but it won't become something I will buy regularly (as opposed to cow's milk).
I drink milk, but we (as in "we in the Western World"), could all do with drinking less of it.
You would be surprised by how many people are unaware of how milk is produced. Only a pregnant female cow can produce milk [Edit: as BenjiWiebe correctly states below, cows lactate after they give birth). So a female dairy cow will spend most of her adult life in a pregnant state. Once she gives birth, she is separated from her calf usually within a few hours (sometimes she'll be together with her offspring for 24 hours, but never more than that).
Then she'll be artificially inseminated again (normally within 3 months of giving birth) so she can start producing milk again. And so the cycle repeats.
The reason milk is so cheap (at least in Europe) is because we aren't prepared to pay for higher welfare conditions. We say we care for farm welfare, but our behaviour shows otherwise. Maybe we care a little bit, but we care even more for cheap prices. (And yes, I confess I am as guilty as the rest of us).
In many European countries, increasing numbers of dairy cows spend their entire lives indoors ("zero grazing"). For example, Germany is the EU's largest milk producer and the majority of dairy cows spend their entire lives indoors with no access to outdoor pasture. This is perfectly legal under EU regulations.
This does not make sense. Why would a cow make milk only while pregnant? So as soon as the calf is born no more milk? I'd expect lactation to occur after birth. A cursory internet search suggests the cycle is pregnancy (9 months), birth, milk production of various duration, 2 months of "drying off" and then on to the next pregnancy. How different is that from what occurs in nature? Don't most animals get pregnant every year during the fertile period of their life? Only unnatural part of this is separation of calf and mother as well as other details like diet. If you're concerned with that you can source your milk from responsible dairy farms, the problem there being that most people value cost savings over humanitarian concerns.
Also note that 20% (according to some random source) of beef production comes from former dairy cows. If you consider meat a byproduct of cow milk then cow milk is saving us from some of the environmental impact of beef production.
Um, the first part of your comment is a common misunderstanding. Female cows produce milk only after they've had a calf. Not during. And they continue producing milk generally for as long as you milk them. Their production does go down over time, but they can be milked for a year after one calf, sometimes two years. Production does go down when they are pregnant, though. :)
Source: 20 years on a dairy
Also, typically, only the milk after the second calf is used. Milk obtained between first and second calf contains proteins that are unsuitable for human consumption.
These types of drinks have nothing in common with milk...
The manufacturing process involves grinding almonds, oats, etc, into a very fine particulate powder, mixing it into water.
Then adding in all things necessary to keep it in suspension, and making it drinkable (try "almond milk" without the sugar and see how long it takes you to regurgitate it back out).
Almond-milk wasn't even selling until they placed it into the refrigerated section of the store next to real milk - to confuse the buyers with what it actually was-not.
It is likely that most consumers think the manufacturers press or squeeze the almonds to get at its "milk", and have no idea they are just drinking a few grams of powdered almonds.
Having both made almond milk and purchased unsweetened almond milk (from the separate non-dairy milk section where it sells quite well) it's just fine. It doesn't need additives, though adding some vegetable gum, oil and emulsifier improves the texture.
Regular cow's milk is around 5% sugar as lactose (I think 4.8% is the typically standardised amount). Unsweetened almond milk has negligible sugar.
What's your point? That oat milk is processed? Do you usually drink cow milk from the udder? Of course it's heavily processed and enriched with different additives as well.
I don't think anyone confuses nut milk for cow milk in stores. It's usually more expensive than cow milk and clearly labeled with the specific main ingredient. I don't think these companies are trying to deceive anyone. There's a relatively small subset of consumers, who are interested in milk substitutes, so it's a niche product that serves them well. And cow milk contains sugars too, lactose, which is a disaccharide of galactose and glucose. Finally, the thought that they would squeeze almonds to get milk also never even crossed my mind. I know it's a suspension of powdered almonds in water. There's even recipes of DIY nut milk, that are essentially "grind almonds, add water, stir". So your whole argument seems just ridiculous to me.
My daughter had an intolerance to cow's milk. We were advised to try soya instead, which her tummy also didn't like. Next we tried oat milk (Oatly being one of the brands) and she loved it. Actually, the rest of us tried it too, and liked it so much that we no longer have any cow's milk in the house.
First, it's not "milk" only because it's a white liquid. Second, if people are so grossed out by milk, why do they want to drink surrogates of it?! I understand that there are lactose intolerant people, too, but I'm not talking about them if it's unclear. I've seen lactose-free milk at stores recently.
I thought lactose intolerance is the main reason why people skip animal milk. The OP mentions that this farmer is going for oat milk for environmental reasons.
Not sure what the original etymology of "Milk" but it seems to have evolved from just referring to mammary liquids to liquids of a smooth, translucent or opaque consistency, e.g. Milk of Magnesia.
I always use dairy milk for coffee and found it odd why people would use soy or almond milk. I guess both have fat; do plant fats react to coffee in the same way that dairy fats do?
I've tried milk alternatives in coffee during Lent, and they all sucked - I'd rather have black coffee than coffee with those surrogates. Not to mention that most milk alternatives have carrageenan, which is a questionable substance, although this is changing as it can no longer be used in Certified Organic products.
I've heard a lot of recent Oatley converts say the same and they insist that while the Oatley "i Kaffe" product takes some geeting used to, it does taste better with coffee that regular milk does. So maybe this company has figured something out?
> First, it's not "milk" only because it's a white liquid
That's exactly why it's milk actually. Just like coconut milk, which has existed forever, milk of magnesia which has existed since 1875, and soy milk which has been widely consumed since the 1800s.
Oat milk is not milk. But it's milk. English has no problem with that. Pizza pie is not pie. Boot camp is not camp. A house boat is not a boat. We understand each other just fine. You add a word to another word and you get a third word that's unique from both of its parts.
Actually the EU recently ruled that "Plant-based foods cannot be sold in the European Union using terms such as milk, butter and cheese". There are some exceptions though. See http://www.bbc.com/news/business-40274645
There's a similar push happening in Australia.
BTW, I think pizza is only called 'pizza pie' in the US? And a house boat is definitely a boat if it floats.
True about the EU ruling, but legal language is often different than more informal everyday language. Obviously the Court of Justice did not rule that you are forbidden from using the word "milk" when speaking to your friends about soy milk :-)
Languages change all the time, adding or removing meanings from words isn't that remarkable.
As for why, it's the same reason people make substitutes for a lot of things. I have coeliac disease and cannot eat any gluten-containing bread, so I make substitutes using various gums and binders to replace the gluten. Even though it isn't the same as a gluten-containing bread it's still useful.
Same goes for alternative milks. An emulsion of fats and water is a useful substance even if it doesn't come from an animal. It binds tannins in tea and coffee and has a nicer mouth-feel than plain water in breakfast cereals.
People are obviously not grossed out because it's called milk or because it's a white liquid. They're grossed out because of how the animals are treated. Or because they think diary production is principally wrong. Or maybe they just don't like the thought of drinking animal milk. Or simply don't quite like the taste. Maybe they're milk protein intolerant.
Or they're not grossed out at all. They just make the rational decision to not consume dairy because of the water, energy and food consumption of the dairy/meat industry. Or because of the greenhouse gas emissions.
What are you saying, if you don't want to contribute to the things mentioned above, you shouldn't be allowed to drink anything that remotely resembles cow milk?
Lactose free milk has been available for a long time, I drank it 20 years ago. It is hyperpasteurized though, which is kind of gross.
Anyway, I pour almond milk on cereal because I like cereal. It probably wouldn't be great on fruit loops, but it works nicely with granola and other nut based cereals.
One of the most significant causes of global warming is milk and beef production, that's the strongest reason to stop using dairy products if you care about what happens to future generations. Treatment of animals is another.
> Second, if people are so grossed out by milk, why do they want to drink surrogates of it?!
I can't explain it, but milk is just gross to me. I eat almost every other dairy product (okay, I'm not a fan of something too fermented, like kefir, ayran and such), but plain milk is psychologically repulsive. Maybe it's because my grandma had a cow when I was a child, and seeing milk come out of a cow was disgusting. Processed dairy products are kind of too far removed from a cow in my mind, so they're okay. Maybe it's the smell of country milk. I don't like homemade country cheeses because of the smell as well. For this reason I love oatly, and almond and coconut milks. Soy milk is fine too. I can also dring flavored milks or coffee with milk (although I prefer it black). I've only met one other person like this in my life, and it felt very validating that I'm not alone in this.
is café con horchata a big thing in the US? I don't remember seeing it on my travels.
It's not widely known in Australia (to us Anglos) but a Mexican friend supplied me with some and it tasted better than the almond or soy substitutes I've had!
I guess it's the seasonings/flavouring they add then.
The vegan milks sold downunder taste like sugary, oily, porridge liquid. My soy milk phase ended when I couldn't finish a 1L carton before it turned into a gloopy mess.
Horchata varies by region. The one I'm familiar with, from Spain, is based on tigernuts. It's a very traditional summer drink and frankly you won't find a different kind of horchata in Spain, unless you search for it in ethnic stores (and even so I'm not sure where I would look for it). Apparently horchata in Mexico is based on rice, and I don't know if there aren't any other versions. I haven't tried rice based horchata, but it soudns very different from the Spanish one, and I'd like to try it some day.
I don't know about how has the term evolved in the English speaking word, but no one in Spain will refer to horchata as milk, nor do we use it as a milk replacement (nobody would mix it with coffee, for example). Also we don't use the term as a generic word for vegetal milk at all. Milk and horchata don't really have anything in common aside from being white drinkable liquids.
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[ 8.3 ms ] story [ 365 ms ] threadWhat do we do with waste from the manufacture of oat beverages?
We work as much for sustainable consumption of food as for a sustainable production of these products. Regarding the consumption of food, it is indisputable that a sustainable diet for the future contains far fewer animal products than we eat today, there is even a great unanimity on this subject in all sciences of this disciplined. In sustainable food production, we believe that the crops of the future will be much more than they are today, focusing directly on food rather than animal feed.
Any production of food products, even based on vegetable raw materials, also generates waste. It is not always possible to use the entire raw material in the final product. In the case of oat beverages, we remove some of the insoluble fiber which results in a loss of nutrients, which are extracted with the insoluble fraction. Efforts to achieve sustainable food production are largely based on sobriety in the use of resources. Regarding waste, we believe that their most sustainable management is to exploit the remaining food and energy in the form of food by making them the ingredients of animal fodder that are still high. All this to benefit from the food produced. In the next step, when all the food has been used as fodder, the final waste is biogas.
But they aren't going to replace milk that we use in, say, the production of butter, cheese, casein, or lactose products.
I'd be curious to see what a pie chart of the end products from our milk production looks like.
Or maybe you are just talking about "soy cheese"? I agree that pure tofu is pretty bland, but with various seasonings (I'm partial to Chili oil), it can be quite good.
It's not as obvious as, say, olive oil vs. canola oil, but it is distinguishable. I can imagine giving up butter in favor of margarine... but then I also doubt the half pound I go through per year has a major impact in the big picture.
As for cheese... I do eat tofu sometimes in place of meats, but don't see it as a good substitute for cheese, except for perhaps a very narrow selection of cheese varieties (perhaps paneer).
I've yet to find a soy substitute for a cheddar or brie. What I have had is soy ricotta, which is about 80% of the way to matching the real thing in terms of texture and about 50% there in terms of flavor. I have no doubt it will be done eventually, but we're still a _very_ long way from replacing a cheese lover's dairy consumption with alternatives.
The point I was trying to make is that replacing the milk sold largely for drinking probably doesn't do much of a dent in the industry demand for dairy.
To make a real impact you'd probably have to replace those uses (or get people to radically change the types of food they eat).
There are excellent butter, yogurt, and cheese products made without dairy. The cheese is made from nuts, not plant-based milks.
And my personal experience with this Oatly milk, it tastes like hay. Which makes me wonder where this demand came from.
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:
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.
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.
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.
https://daiyafoods.com/
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.
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.
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.
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.
Given that oat milk cuts out the middleman (middlecow?), should this not be cheaper anyway, or are there scale effects preventing it from reaching price parity?
I thought only diets and lifestyle can be healthy, regardless of what a single ingredient can do.
Also, if it is vegetable oil, how come there's protein in it? I thought oil is just fat? There's 4 grams of protein in 100mL of soy/oat milk (about the same as cow breast milk). Almonds on the other hand are a big scam with only 0.x protein, water with some flavour.
There are definitely healthy fats and unhealthy ones, for example everyone can agree trans fats are in the latter category. The perfect fatty acid profile is a matter for debate but it's definitely possible to isolate bad ingredients by a variety of means (populational studies, etc). It's not easy though, if it were then there wouldn't be so much debate in this space.
"[We] have known about the harms of fatty acid imbalance, and an excess of omega-6, for a long time. So much so that sunflower oil in the US was 'upgraded' through selective breeding to produce a high-oleic-acid variety (high monounsaturated fatty acid) that now prevails, and AVOIDS the potential harms noted in this paper. The same thing is now being done to soybean oil, and the high monounsaturated fatty acid version of that will soon replace the old variety.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2016/04/13/the-ani...
(EDIT: And the oil in Oatly happens to be rapeseed oil.)
(EDIT2: And the oil in almond milk is almond oil...)
There is very little evidence to support that consuming vegetable oils as a replacement for animal fats results in better health.
https://thebigfatsurprise.com
She has also done a TED talk that gives a very quick summary of the book:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CHGiid6N9Q
That Wikipedia article doesn't really support your contention that vegetable oils are healthy and animal fats are unhealthy. That is, at the very least, a gross simplification. In my opinion, the research is not yet good enough to draw any such definitive conclusion.
Vegetable oils have been a large part of the human diet for less than 100 years, but have been progressively increasingly consumed by western populations, especially in the U.S. In that time overall cardiovascular health has trended in what direction?
Anyway, this might all be a sideshow to the general reduction in calories being derived from fat in general. The replacement of calories from fat with calories from carbohydrates seems particularly harmful when taken to an extreme, especially for women.
But, again, my main contention is that the evidence is at best preliminary, based on observational studies which cannot show cause and effect, and often poorly controlled and based on small numbers of participants. The largest, best controlled studies often don't support the mainstream view. It's simply not scientifically settled.
That said, I find Oatly less watery and much less sweet than the last oat milk I remember trying. It has a darker greenish-gray color than other plant milks (maybe from the added algae?). It still tastes like oats (though less than others) and not like milk. In a blind tasting, I think I would prefer it to other oat and similar milks because of the more rounded, less earthy and less sweet taste than the others I have had.
Overall, it's better than the competition, but it won't become something I will buy regularly (as opposed to cow's milk).
You would be surprised by how many people are unaware of how milk is produced. Only a pregnant female cow can produce milk [Edit: as BenjiWiebe correctly states below, cows lactate after they give birth). So a female dairy cow will spend most of her adult life in a pregnant state. Once she gives birth, she is separated from her calf usually within a few hours (sometimes she'll be together with her offspring for 24 hours, but never more than that).
Then she'll be artificially inseminated again (normally within 3 months of giving birth) so she can start producing milk again. And so the cycle repeats.
The reason milk is so cheap (at least in Europe) is because we aren't prepared to pay for higher welfare conditions. We say we care for farm welfare, but our behaviour shows otherwise. Maybe we care a little bit, but we care even more for cheap prices. (And yes, I confess I am as guilty as the rest of us).
In many European countries, increasing numbers of dairy cows spend their entire lives indoors ("zero grazing"). For example, Germany is the EU's largest milk producer and the majority of dairy cows spend their entire lives indoors with no access to outdoor pasture. This is perfectly legal under EU regulations.
Also note that 20% (according to some random source) of beef production comes from former dairy cows. If you consider meat a byproduct of cow milk then cow milk is saving us from some of the environmental impact of beef production.
(FWIW I don't drink animal milk.)
The manufacturing process involves grinding almonds, oats, etc, into a very fine particulate powder, mixing it into water.
Then adding in all things necessary to keep it in suspension, and making it drinkable (try "almond milk" without the sugar and see how long it takes you to regurgitate it back out).
Almond-milk wasn't even selling until they placed it into the refrigerated section of the store next to real milk - to confuse the buyers with what it actually was-not.
It is likely that most consumers think the manufacturers press or squeeze the almonds to get at its "milk", and have no idea they are just drinking a few grams of powdered almonds.
Regular cow's milk is around 5% sugar as lactose (I think 4.8% is the typically standardised amount). Unsweetened almond milk has negligible sugar.
Not sure what the original etymology of "Milk" but it seems to have evolved from just referring to mammary liquids to liquids of a smooth, translucent or opaque consistency, e.g. Milk of Magnesia.
I always use dairy milk for coffee and found it odd why people would use soy or almond milk. I guess both have fat; do plant fats react to coffee in the same way that dairy fats do?
That's exactly why it's milk actually. Just like coconut milk, which has existed forever, milk of magnesia which has existed since 1875, and soy milk which has been widely consumed since the 1800s.
Oat milk is not milk. But it's milk. English has no problem with that. Pizza pie is not pie. Boot camp is not camp. A house boat is not a boat. We understand each other just fine. You add a word to another word and you get a third word that's unique from both of its parts.
There's a similar push happening in Australia.
BTW, I think pizza is only called 'pizza pie' in the US? And a house boat is definitely a boat if it floats.
As for why, it's the same reason people make substitutes for a lot of things. I have coeliac disease and cannot eat any gluten-containing bread, so I make substitutes using various gums and binders to replace the gluten. Even though it isn't the same as a gluten-containing bread it's still useful.
Same goes for alternative milks. An emulsion of fats and water is a useful substance even if it doesn't come from an animal. It binds tannins in tea and coffee and has a nicer mouth-feel than plain water in breakfast cereals.
Or they're not grossed out at all. They just make the rational decision to not consume dairy because of the water, energy and food consumption of the dairy/meat industry. Or because of the greenhouse gas emissions.
What are you saying, if you don't want to contribute to the things mentioned above, you shouldn't be allowed to drink anything that remotely resembles cow milk?
Anyway, I pour almond milk on cereal because I like cereal. It probably wouldn't be great on fruit loops, but it works nicely with granola and other nut based cereals.
I can't explain it, but milk is just gross to me. I eat almost every other dairy product (okay, I'm not a fan of something too fermented, like kefir, ayran and such), but plain milk is psychologically repulsive. Maybe it's because my grandma had a cow when I was a child, and seeing milk come out of a cow was disgusting. Processed dairy products are kind of too far removed from a cow in my mind, so they're okay. Maybe it's the smell of country milk. I don't like homemade country cheeses because of the smell as well. For this reason I love oatly, and almond and coconut milks. Soy milk is fine too. I can also dring flavored milks or coffee with milk (although I prefer it black). I've only met one other person like this in my life, and it felt very validating that I'm not alone in this.
A good discussion about this: https://cooking.stackexchange.com/a/76006
It's not widely known in Australia (to us Anglos) but a Mexican friend supplied me with some and it tasted better than the almond or soy substitutes I've had!
The vegan milks sold downunder taste like sugary, oily, porridge liquid. My soy milk phase ended when I couldn't finish a 1L carton before it turned into a gloopy mess.
I don't know about how has the term evolved in the English speaking word, but no one in Spain will refer to horchata as milk, nor do we use it as a milk replacement (nobody would mix it with coffee, for example). Also we don't use the term as a generic word for vegetal milk at all. Milk and horchata don't really have anything in common aside from being white drinkable liquids.