March 28th 2020

Oat milk, micro-greens, sourdough starter, and a.c.v.

Is it okay to start a blog post with a small confession? I’m asking this question because of the confession I want to make; I do not handle my own failures well. It’s probably why I put off this blog for so long. Not just during my quarantine time, but over the years. I’m confessing this to you because today’s experiments were NOT perfect. And then I remembered the name of my blog, and the fact that I don’t have an audience yet, so it’s only up from here, right?

Today I tried to make oat milk. And it was the biggest feat of today’s projects, but’s also the only one that had results to show right away. Only time will tell with the other projects… I wanted to make oat milk because Oatly and Chobani have got me hooked on oat milk cold brew and oat milk lattes at home. So creamy, so clean, hardly a flavor difference from real milk and still healthy for you! Plus it doesn’t take near as much water to grow the crops for oat milk than it does for, say, almond or rice milk. I’m a fan.

So yesterday during my allotted time for leisure in the late afternoon, I was scrolling both pinterest and google for different oat milk recipes and they all looked pretty standard. Oats, water, blend, strain, done. So I’m thinkin, “Neat, this’ll be a breeze.”

It was not a breeze.

I decided that the best way to get the most that I can from my little rolled oats was to soak them in water overnight before blending them. I’d seen some recipes that suggested it, but I was also only skimming. Psh, I know what I’m doing. So last night I got some nice thick cut oats (Bobs Redmill) and covered them with water and soaked them overnight.

Then this afternoon I strained the water out and put them in my sad, hand-me-down, barely-still-alive blender and set to work. Can you tell where I went wrong?

Look at this very thick slop. I’m laughing now because I just realized how gross it looks, but at the time I was so mad. It was barely straining through and I wasn’t even using cheese cloth (it was busy drying from the many batches of ricotta I’ve made this month.)

What was I thinking? I shouldve left the water in with the oats while blending them. So, realizing that, I returned the oat slop to the blender and added a half a cup of water at a time while blending slowly, stopping to stir with my spoon because my blender doesn’t want to pull the stuff from the top down.

It got better. The oat slop started to loosen up and I had something that much more resembled a drinking liquid rather than something I wanted to smear across my dry forehead skin. Then I returned the loose slop back to the strainer and finally I was getting that milky liquid that I so longed for. The flavor was a little too bland, so I added a small dash of vanilla and a couple squirts of honey to help bring out the creaminess. I’m happy with how it tastes. It certainly isn’t Oatly, but it is better than I thought it would be .

The milk still didn’t look quite right, though. It was still a little grainy and looked slightly tanner than what I’m used to seeing in the market-standard counterpart. So I took my tea strainer and put that in the funnel for the bottle I was going to use. And that really did the trick. I could even see the texture change to pure strained oaty goodness as it went into the bottle. Much better!

And so thats that for the Oat milk! I’m thinking hot chocolate with oat milk for the rainy day tomorrow 🙂

As for the leftover oat mush… I actually did spread some on my face and let it dry during the second straining process! It was actually kind of amazing because after I rinsed it off, I didn’t need to apply moisurizer after. Wonderful! The rest got mixed with spices and a mexican vanilla bean. I’m sure that’ll be fun to play with tomorrow.

Not to be confused with the oat mush, is my sourdough starter!

I mixed up 50g each of rye flour and pineapple juice two days ago, and today my starter (The Bitch) will get it’s first feeding. I removed half the starter, and added 27g each of rye and pineapple juice.

Why rye and why pineapple juice? I have made this starter before and the science behind it is cool. Rye flour (or any whole grain flour) has these enzymes that attract and awaken wild yeasts. It has delicious flavor and is higher in nutrients than, say, whole wheat flour. And pineapple juice will only be here for the next three feedings and then I’ll be switching to pure filtered water. The reason for this is pineapple juice has the right enzymes in it to fight off bad bacteria that might try to take over in the beginning of our tasty science experiment, and it also promotes the good bacteria we want (the starter.) Hopefully in a week or so, I’ll be able to start making bread on the daily with just flour, water, salt and starter. Whoever bought all the dried yeast at Kroger, I’m onto you.

Next on my project list today was Apple Cider Vinegar (A.C.V.) I’m very excited to see about this. I’ve never made a vinegar before, much less cider! I’m following a wiki-how recipe, and I’m glad to see that their description on the amount of apple scraps is pretty vague. It said for a richer flavor use an apple that higher in sugar, so basically like a snacking apple. I had three jazz apples that I think were picked from trees in apple heaven, they are so tasty. So I sliced them up and used the scraps and some of the chopped up apple and put it in my french press container and covered it with water and added 1tsp for every apple present. Then I covered the top with cheese cloth.

Then the directions said to place in a warm, dark place, away from any daylight. In the desperate search around my (has it always been this bright in here?) apartment, I realized I had the perfect tool at my disposal. My cousin/roommate had a ceramic jar purely meant for pickling purposes.

Perfection! The A.C.V. will live in my pseudo garden, right next to where our room heaters are. Not too close, but close enough and out of the way of getting bumped. It’ll get a stir everyday and in a week I’ll have cider? Maybe? And then if that goes according to plan, after a few months I’ll have vinegar! Fingers and toes crossed.

For the final project of the day; micro-greens!

This is also not my first time growing these guys. I gotta say, I LOVE gardening. Love it. Love starting seeds, love watering plants, talking to them, surrounding myself with them… They are definitely my favorite second hobby, I could go on with that backstory, but this post is already pretty long.

Anyhoooo, I knew that when growing these guys, I didn’t want to grow them in dirt and I didn’t want to have to buy coconut coir either. Last time I used just a coffee filter in the bottom of a plastic container with a clear lid and sprinkled the seeds on top of the filter. Worked like a charm! This time I’m using the top of an egg carton with a coffee filter. I just wanna see if the carton makes a difference at all. We’ll see.

You can see that I like patience projects. Perhaps the delayed stress of failure is what I gravitate towards. Like waiting for a report card from a class you only paid half attention to. Until then.

– Rieu 🙂