Oat milk is great imo. Planet Oat extra creamy is the best available where I’m at.
Depending on your patience, you can make your own for super cheap. It’s roughly 100g oats to 1000g water, with 20-50g neutral oil, and a tiny bit of guar and xanthan gums. Blend the oats and water for a minute, strain, then add the gums and oil and blend again. Sweeten to taste. Maybe ten minutes max.
If you can get it easily, adding amylase enzymes (blend of alpha, beta and gamma works best) after blending, warming to around 140, let sit for 30 minutes and then raise to 180 for 5 will increase the sweetness and keep it from getting gloopy. You can get them pretty cheap from a brewing supply store. It’s how they make commercial oat milk, and it’s how they can say “no added sugar” and still have it be sweet.
Yeah see this is the thing.
Looking at the ingredients of oat milk it’s often as little as 2% oats.
That checks out looking at these ingredients… 4/5ths of the oats are strained out.
That means it’s really oily unsugary water with a whiff of oat.
What is even the point of that.
Also, fun fact… the xanthan gum seems to kill the creme on a nice cup of black coffee. So a dish of oat milk in your long black is… undesirable.
Horchata, aka chilled rice drink, is only like less than 1% rice! It’s mostly water and sugar, with some spices!
What’s the POINT?!?!
Spoiler: horchata is delicious, and basically the same thing as oatmilk, when you get down to it.
The “point” is that it’s a tasty beverage.
Why on earth would you measure the quality of a beverage by how diluted the solids are, or how much filler gets strained out?
“Milk is just watered down cheese! It’s 87% water! What’s the point of it?”
Coffee hardly has any coffee in it, you throw away most of the bean.
Don’t even get me started on broth.
The fat content is equal to or lower than the fat content of typical dairy based creamers, which is also where the sugar content comes from. A mild quantity of fat is required for the creamer to have a good mouth feel and have a degree of “coating” effect. The gums help keep the fat in suspension since I lack a homogenizer like they use on milk, as well as increasing the viscosity in a way that’s imparted by protein in milk.
If you want to you can just eat the result without filtering. It’s called oatmeal. It’s still watered down though, so I might recommend toasting them and having a nice dry oat bar to go with your puck of dehydrated milk.
In general, I’d recommend against putting any sort of creamer in your black coffee. It tends to make it no longer black coffee.
I don’t personally find issue with any of the emulsifies doing anything to coffee I don’t like, but if you’re exploring there are plenty of others. I’ve had good luck with konjac in a blend with guar, xanthan, and methylcellulose, but two of those are less likely to be in the baking aisle at the store. The more you use the smaller the proportional quantity you need, since they have a synergistic effect. Less than a gram total combined weight of the four previous ones makes a consistency like heavy cream. Great for ice cream base.
What does neutral oil mean? Just any vegetable oil like olive oil or canola oil etc?
An oil without a flavor. Olive oil is an example of a not neutral oil since it imparts a flavor to the dish.
Corn, vegetable, soybean, canola and peanut are good examples. No one would drizzle a little corn oil on a plate to dip bread in. :)
They also can tolerate higher temperatures, so you can use them in cooking a bit easier.
