Milking Oats

Much less grope-y than milking goats.

After more than three years of busy service to us, our soy milk maker has pretty much carked it (see my posts on it here and here). We looked at getting new ones, but the idea of choosing was a bit overwhelming and we have put it at the back of our minds. (But if you're in Australia and can recommend a good brand or model, we would be happy to take suggestions.)

Instead, we've been making oat milk. It's no substitute for bought-milk in tea, but it does the trick on a bowl of cereal. Here's what we do:

We get two of these jugs of milk, plus about 2 cups of pulp from each batch.

Combine 1 1/2 cups of rolled oats, 1 tsp of desiccated coconut, and 1 tsp of raw sugar in a jug. Add 1 litre of water, and let it soak for about 30 minutes. Then blend it all up - I use a stick blender - for a few minutes. Pour this through a fine strainer and scoop out the thick oat pulp. Pour it into containers, and then I add enough water to fill the jugs - our typical batch is about 2.5 litres of oat milk. You can add less if you prefer it thicker. The milk lasts in the fridge for about a week.

But what to do with the 2 cups or so of sticky, wet oat pulp that comes along with the milk? You could throw it away, or compost it, or feed it to the dog. But we've been playing around with adding it to things. We've mixed it into lentil loafs and burgers, but it makes them go a bit gluey in texture.

More successful were these nutella brownie bites - 200 grams of hazlenuts whizzed up in the food processor, then a cup of dates, half a cup of oat pulp, and 1/4 cup of cocoa powder. They were a bit wetter than they should have been, but the oat pulp was a good way of cutting through the sweetness of the dates that sometimes overwhelms raw balls.

I pushed some into silicon cupcake liners, and made some into balls.

Oat pulp is also a pretty fab addition to baking. I made some banana-oat muffins and bread, using oat pulp in place of half the mashed bananas. I don't know the nutrition content, but I'm sure it adds a boatload of fibre and cuts down a little on the (natural, and not bad-for-you) sugar in the bananas.

The banana-oat things are in the background of our Sunday lunch of veggie sausages wrapped in bread dough. 

What is your favourite kind of milk to make? What do you do with the leftover pulp?