A few years ago it became clear I was dairy intolerant. I’d eat ice-cream, cheese and cakes smothered in buttercream, and get a bad stomach – but it wouldn’t cross my mind that I should stop, or that something was wrong. Just kept shoving it in like a genius! So I started drinking oat milk instead of cow’s milk as that is a really easy change.
I used to like the brand Oatly, which costs around £1.50 – £2 a litre, but with this “recipe'” (it’s pretty funny calling it a recipe because it’s two ingredients, but really, is water actually an ingredient?), you can make pretty much a litre for 15p.
Honestly, if you buy and drink cow milk alternatives, this is going to save you a fortune.
Oh, takes two minutes without a blender and seconds if you have one.
What do you need to make oat milk?
Right, you ready for complicated?
- 1 cup of rolled oats (you know the cheap type, where 1KG is about £1
- 4 cups of water
- If you want it sweetened, shove something a bit sweet in it to taste. Sugar works!
I know ‘cups’ is a really American term, so use whatever really. As long as there’s a 1 to 4 ratio, it’s going to taste nice.
Equipment-wise:
- In an ideal world, you’ll have a blender
- If not, a bowl and something to bash the oats with. I used a meat tenderiser but literally anything heavy and long will do!
- Something to strain the milk from the oats – so muslin cloth is best because you can really squeeze it out but a sieve works too.
How to make oat milk at home
If you have a blender, just stick all the ingredients in there and blitz, but I’m not fancy – so I have to do it the old fashioned way.
- Get your oats, put one cup in a bowl and then add 4 cups of water
- Bash it about a bit with something. You want to break up the oats.
- Then get a jug, put muslin over the top and pour in the oat milk.
- Voila! You have oat milk.
If you have any ideas to use up the old oats (shove in a smoothie?), let me know. I hate waste.
How much does oat milk cost to make at home?
I made my boyfriend do the maths for this because this is a very serious blog and if you leave maths up to me, I’ll just make up a number and hope you never check!
Anyway, he measured how much a cup of oats weighs, and long story short, the 1kg bag of rolled oats we had cost £1, and the cup was 15ps worth.
So that’s it really. It doesn’t get cheaper or easier than this. Let me know if you try it out.
UPDATE: Someone in my Twitter mentions has made a good point. If you are drinking oat milk as part of a vegan lifestyle, be wary that the stuff in shops might be fortified with the vitamin B12. Just worth noting so you can replace it elsewhere.
I don’t do recipes often, but if you want the recipe to my favourite cake of all time – check it out.
My hospital dietician told me to check that the plant milks I was drinking in place of cows milk contain calcium and vitamin D. You may be getting it in your diet from other sources.
You can use the oats in muffins, banana bread, other bread, cookies, pancakes or even make oat flour. They’re definitely good in smoothies. Adding a banana to the oat milk makes it perfectly sweetened. Thank you for your recipe.