I'm actually a food scientist for an oatmilk company - The way you laid this out is great for a base oat milk! For a fun challenge, try to make it have a stable foam like coffee shops do. The science behind a 'barista blend' is super interesting

It wasn't as bad as I thought. Adding a natural enzyme present in the human body isn't the most horrific sounding process.

Just to add more info: you do not need to add amylase to get sugars. Oats themselves, as many other seeds, have amylases in them. You can activate this amylase by leaving soaked oats in warm water (around 64-70ºC/148-158ºF) for a while (about 1 h), in a process called mashing. This is how you extract sugars from cereals in brewing.

I feel like it's worth mentioning that most commercial oat milks DO use amylase enzymes, but two specific types. Alpha and beta amylase. Alpha-amylase is widely available, but beta-amylase is harder to come by. This is what Oatly uses to aid in their flavor profile. Additionally, fats are added to aid in the "creamy" flavor as well as to make oat milk more akin to cows milk. Oatly uses rapeseed (canola) oil, and varies the percentage of oil added to make their low fat and whole milk variants. Lastly, dipotassium phosphate (among other FDA required fortifiers) is added as an emulsifier and buffering agent. Dipotassium phosphate has a bitter taste on its own, so Oatly has to balance this with their sweetness. They add this emulsifier to aid in separation on store shelves. It's also why oat milks don't generally come in clear packaging. Not many people would want to buy a heap of flour with water on top. All of this said, you can pretty easily replicate Oatly at home without their commercial enzymes. Maltose (the sugars created by amylase enzymes) is about 30-60% as sweet as sucrose (table sugar), so you can substitute the maltose with sucrose accordingly. About 2 wt% Then add ~2 wt% of canola oil for the whole milk variant. All of these measurements can be gleaned from Oatly's patents and nutrition label.

Sheesh what a spectacular investigation thank you for this

a note that you can also use malted oats (or barley) instead of chemical amylase if you want something "fully natural" or whatever, and it'll also have a malted flavor which some people really enjoy

To make this with 100% Oats (hypothetically) simply malt some oat seeds (let them start sprouting). Then grind them and mix them in with your cooked oat juice once it has cooled to 165F. As a seed sprouts it generates amylase so that it can use the stored energy in the starch to grow. If you stop the sprouting (dry the seed w/o overheating) there will be excess amylase left over to convert some of the starch in your oat juice into sugars. This is exactly how alcohol is fermented from grains. Sugars feed yeast, starch doesn't. Well, not _exactly_ . Beer brewers usually use malted barley, but malted corn and wheat will also work, so I assume oat seeds will as well. The basic chemistry is the same for all starchy seeds.

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As somebody that has had a dairy allergy his whole life(23 years) I have always drank soy milk until about 3 or 4 years ago when I started drinking Oat milk and wow it is great. I don't think people realize how good it is like wow

As a beer brewer I guessed it right because the same kind of enzyme rest is also about half the physical work of making beer. You soak your malted grain (sprouted so it produces its own enzymes then dried) in water warmed to the best temperature range for the enzymes, conventionally for an hour. (Then you usually boil it and throw in some hops, and throw in some yeast once it's cooled down.)

I've been making myself this question since I tried Industrial oat milk, several years ago. I thought the branches were lying about the added sugars. I finally understand it. Thank you! :D

This was very interesting to me, I recently found out that I have a dairy and soy allergy. After 45 years of drinking milk and milk products, Oatly is the most palatable and closest mouthfeel to drinking dairy. I also like the sweetened Milkadamia from Macadamia nuts.

I feel like I want a starch milk tier list now. Like what happens if you just use it on straight cornstarch. Or what about plantain milk

I was so happy to find Oatly while living in Ireland. What most people in the United States don’t know is that Oatly has a version of their oat milk in a brown container that literally is just oats, water, and salt! The organic oat milk I’m waiting to see back home in the states someday hopefully!

tried to make my own oat milk once with just oats, water and salt- it was a disaster and didn't taste good at all. thanks for breaking it down and explaining it properly!

This is one of the best explanations for the very tricky topic of added sugar/free sugars etc. that we've seen. Bravo!

If you don't have amylase powder, just pre chew your oats. That's how chicha, a traditional south American corn beer is made. Also a lot of grains already contain the necessary enzyme / produce it when they sprout, so in beer production the grain gets sprouted and then roasted once enough of the starch has been converted to malt sugar which are the 2 glucose molecules chained together.

I make homemade hemp milk by putting hemp seeds and water into my Vitamix blender. Very simple and there’s no filtering involved. I use it everyday for lattes and sometimes I use it for cooking.

I'm so glad i found this channel, you have so many interesting videos! I wanna watch all of it.

Instead of buying amylase you can chew the oats for few a while before soaking. That's how some Amazonian tribes prepare starch for fermentation, by using their saliva enzymes. You probably don't want to offer it to squeamish guests

This was so neat!!! Loved the sciency animations. You're so good!❤❤❤

really cool! I did try to make oat milk once. 1 cup of oats was sent to the garbage that day, now I know why. Might try again with some enzyme/malt strategy

Tbh the title feels more like a lie than oat milk

I’m 54 and until today I didn’t know how much I’d enjoy watching a nice man with a funky beard boiling oats. You live and learn 😁

DUDE your work is super interesting... I LOVE your channel idea and all, if i wasnt so busy with work already i would have a little chat with you and maybe start filming some stuff along those lines but on my home language and on the BRASIL reality... We lack that kind of content and all i find about food and science or history its on english Btw keep up the good work

Finally, i tried to make it myself last week and i was thinking.... they make something in the factory before blending. Thanks a lot!

I always wondered about that. I eat a ton of oats, so I tend to not get it that often (you can't live on just oat based stuff, or else I would). I've made almond milk, and that was really easy, a lot like what you tried at the beginning, but with soaking oats and then blending it. It's interesting how the two are often compared, yet the process is different.

Dude easy new sub gained! Very informative content delivered well in a short amount of time. Thanks for not stretching the video for more ads lol

I made some with 1 cup of oats to 3 cups of water and added honey and salt. It was ok for cereals.

Dude, love your vids! Keep up the good work!

In the UK, these products are labelled as "Oat Drink", not "Oat Milk". The ingredients are listed as Water, Oats 10%, Rapeseed Oil, Minerals (Calcium Carbonate, Calcium Phosphates, Potassium Iodide), Salt, Vitamins (D2, Riboflavin, B12). The nutrition information is broadly similar, once you've compensated for the size difference between 100ml and a US cup! There is nothing on the label about "added sugars"; instead, after the Carbohydrates lines, it says "Of which sugars" and an asterisk. The asterisk takes you to another line which says "*Natural sugars from oats". There is no mention of any enzymes.

Yup. You basically just did a brewing mash (one of the first steps of beer making). Base malt (malted barley) would do the same trick for you without the added amylase. It has plenty to convert its own starches as well as the oats.

Enzyme activity reminds me of home brewing stuff, using malted barley. Wonder if you can get malted oats.

This is why cake batter tastes sweeter than cooked cake in reverse. During the baking process, some of the sugar in the cake combines into starch, making the end product less sweet. Edit: I love spreading misinformation online

At the start of the pandemic people at work were sharing all kinds of recipes and stuff and I tried the first oat milk recipe and ppured the whole thing out. Thanks for your much improved one ❤️

Loved your explanation!!

This isn’t a thing I had ever thought of but it’s so interesting!

Thanks for the great video! Almost a year ago I came across the company Nectarbar which ships liquidised enzymes in two little bottles to make oat milk. The first one contains amylase and the second one - apparently responsible for sweeting - amylase and peptidase. It works and tastes great but now I’m wondering what peptidase actually does and whether it would change/improve your recipe or is necessary at all. By the way, according to the company’s instructions I just blend rolled oats (without boiling them beforehand) with 70°C water and two drops of the first (amylase) liquid. After about 20 minutes I add two drops of the second liquid (amylase + peptidase), blend for two seconds and let it rest for about an hour. Adding a pinch of salt and some drops of oil as an emulsifier is optional.

So informative thx !

This processing in beer-making is known as mashing - setting the grain bill to certain temp ranges and holding it to allow the enzymes convert the starches into sugars to ferment into beer.

I really like when you go into the science of food!

Alright, I called it correctly. As I followed along, it seemed like you would use enzyme activity, such as they do in brewing beer, and sure enough, that was it. Since amylase is in saliva, this explains why some cultures create foods/drinks where they spit into the contents as part of making it. Of course this grosses us all out, but hey, we're human, and we usually have good reasons for the things we do.

This was super cool and insightful. Wonderful video and I am certainly going to check out your bread video now.

A lot of what you discussed is applicable to brewing beer. It would be cool if you made a video talking why barely is the preferred grain for beer making

if you dont want to use commerial amylase you can use the middle flesh of a sweet potato mixed with oatmilk as it has amylase and heat that to 40C for an hour to break down some starch.

I think making amazake (alcohol free sweet rice wine) from rice and koji works the same way. You do have to maintain a lower temperature for that one though. IIRC, something like 50 Celsius or so.

Good experiment by the way.

Great video. Good vibes. Earned a sub

Most commercial milk alternatives have other ingredients added to help them mimic the consistency of cow's milk, and of course, let's not forget the fortification with vitamins and minerals so that people can get the same nutrients cow's milk has.

Another way of going about this would be to add some pale malted barley to your recipe (treat the barley as if it were the enzyme) since it contains that enzyme. A good way of adding to the flavour and using a natural ingredient.

I wonder what happens if you make oat milk from roasted oats? In distilling you'd roast your grains before exposing them to yeast, I always thought that was for the same reason, to break up the starch a bit and give the yeast some sugar to feast on. maybe you can cut out the amylase by doing that?

Thanks for this video. You’ve just cleared up something I’d wondered about for a while.

One of the best food channels HANDS down. You're amazing

As someone who drinks oat milk because of a milk allergy, seeing this video nearly gave me a heart attack and feared I would drop dead any minute now. Good to know it wasn't actually anything so dire.

I do not eat plant based, but have started making oat milk to replace dairy in recipies. (This is a HUGE budget saver) For my purposes, I use only water and oats. And don't strain it if it will be used imediately. I have found that homemade oat milk works perfect in baked goods and smoothies. I do still use varying portions of dairy in most of my sauces and soups.

Super fascinating video. Well done! I love Oatly barista blend but might have to give this a go sometime.

Fun stuff to do with leftover amylase: mash up a whole bunch of fruit or veggies, add water and analyze, let it sit for couple days, then add yeast. Stick it in a warm dark place for a couple months and poof you've got booze. Further distilling may be required. Tech Ingredients did a bananananana booze that way, but they had to distill it. Also I guessed right that they broke the starch down via enzymatic action. Yay for chem class.

This brings to mind the Japanese tradition of Kuchikamizake (featured in Makoto Shinkai's Your Name as to where most people will have heard of it), where they chewed rice and then spit into a container, essentially using the saliva's enzymes as a fermentation base. Cool video!

This same enzyme can be found in a malted version of the grain and activated by raising it to the proper temperature. This is referred to as a "mash" and is an early step in beer making.

Blending in ~2% fat really helps with the body/consistency, can use a very small amount of xanthan gum and/or soy lecithin to help keep the emulsion stable. This was very helpful, thank you

Fascinating! Since going vegan a few years back we wanted to find a cheaper alternative to buying plant milk and started to make our own. What we came up with is perfectly fine on musli - but we still use the fancy barista stuff for tea and coffee. We add a couple of dates for sweetness and a few nuts which I think might help it emulsify a little. One interesting thing we did find is that with standard oats you had to be really careful not to blend them for more than 30 seconds or it would turn to gloop. If you use organic oats you can blend it for as long as you like and there's no gloopiness. Turns out it was the gluten in the dust on the oats (from manufacturing other products) that made it gloopy. Oats themselves are apparently gluten free.

The process you describe is reminiscent of that involved in the conversion of grain to malt such as used in the making of beer. Thanks!

Great video!

i knew this alreayd but was a good vid, subbed!

What about adding oil with lecithin as an emulgator?

So, its not bad to drink oat milk and is an easy process to really improve it in home. Nice!! Thanks for your video!

As a brewer/distiller I called this one before the vid started. Great job explaining it!

That was a fantastic topic! I really enjoyed the video as well as the comments :)

I thin Oatly might roast their oat before cooking it, although I might be wrong, as they don't sell it as Roasted. However roasting it would definitely add flavours, like it does for Almonds.

I was drinking almond milk for a while but due to water consumption concerns I've switched to oat. Surprisingly it works just like Dairy milk in many applications including instant pudding and cheese sauces. I wonder how that works?

All amylase enzyme products I can find use dextrose as a blend/carrier. Doesn't this mean we are basically adding straight up sugar to the mixture (quick search shows Dextrose is chemically identical to glucose). Not a chemist so I don't really know anything about this.

There’s an adult beverage from the renaissance called Athell Brose who’s many variations includes whiskey, oatmilk., and honey. I soak old fashion oats in whiskey (cheap, but still drinkable bourbon, Evan Williams works well) for a few days, swirling occasionally then let it settle and use a lot, as in multiple batches, of the settled oaty part to make it. Add a bunch of honey until sweet. Shake before serving. Unbelievably good stuff. Cheers!

Love the video and hate the title but it did get me to click lol…so I enjoyed seeing how this is done after reading about it from some type of specialist in the Amazon comments section for this product ☺️❤️❤️

I never actually knew raw potatoes were a thing anyone worried about, I’ve snacked on them with a bit of salt since I was a kid without any issue. Reminds me of the whole raw flour thing, just never was a thing when I grew up.

This was awesome!! I didn’t know I could basically make it myself. By the way, since “calcium” and “vitamin D” are fortified (artificially added) into oat milk, what is the best way to do this? Do you know any good nutrient sources that I can buy to fortify it? Also how long do you estimate it will last in the fridge? Thanks :)

Does pasta still contain starch in granules, even though it's been somewhat processed? It seems the gelatinization you mentioned happens to the starchy pasta water...and the pasta itself if you overcook it. Is gelatinization a process of polymerization of the starch molecules?

You never explain how oat milk is a "lie".

would it be possible to use Malted Oat, since it'd contain its own enzyme?

thanks for recommending ur bread video! i cant wait to catch it in just a sec 😊

Dude, you're such a bad ass! I just stumbled upon your channel and I'm so glad I did! Too groovy my man! 👍🏿

I have avoided 'over night oats" (the kind you make yourself with just your rolled oats and whatever you'd like to add) because I didn't understand how it could be digestable. But, so many like it. Is soaking oatmeal for a number of hours somehow a standin for cooking the starch?

Oatmilk is basically a variant of Ovaltine. The amylases breaking apart the starch into sugars... that's malted milk.

Did cooking your oatmeal reduce the volume of water so drastically from 6 cups to what looks like maybe two when you add it to the sous vide? Thanks for recipe. I’m trying it now. 🤞🏼🤙🏼

Do you think the added synthetic vitamins and minerals, especially calcium in plant "milks" are as bio-available as they are in animal milk?

I think a possible reason for the slightly sweet taste is due to the Maillard reaction when the oatmilk is subjected to UHT during production to keep it shelf stable.

The seed oils are the most worrying part

I love the google searches just being regular searches, you can see the little stuff that ends up being part of the video as well (“what percent of the world uses the metric system”)

Just found your channel because of this video, time to binge the best of ‘Flavor Lab’

Thank you for this video !I'm a pro pastry chef, and my daughter is a food scientist, and the whole subject of pretend 'healthy" food is a HUGE pet peeve for both of us. It really infuriates me to see all of the false claims made in the name of food marketing. Trader Joes is one of the worst offenders. Their misleading labeling infuriates me so much that I refuse to shop there, or even go inside, because it makes me so livid. LAbeling food using terms like "less guilt " Is just like semi-truck through the loopholes in the FDA's labeling standards while they go "na-ne-naa-nah!

Maybe they should have to call it "processed oat base"that sounds so yummy

Since you have the enzyme in your mouth, it would also help either chewing the oatmeal for a while or just spitting into the cooked oatmeal, right?

I like that you didn't edit out the few uhhs and pauses. I get tired of people over fiddling with videos and excess jump cuts to chop out insignificant breaks.

As someone who isn't vegan but still makes it every so often based on internet recipes, I add butter to make mine which makes it have a nicer texture. I add sugar and/or syrup for flavor. I take the oat leftovers, mix it with golden syrup and microwave until dry and make a makeshift breakfast bar. That or I feed a little to my pet.

That was fascinating. I will never trust any drink of any kind again.

Cool video, but how do they get away without listing the enzyme on the ingredients? They must not add it, but use some other component like time and heat to get the same effect.

Fun fact. Some tribes in Africa and Oceania use human saliva to make varieties of local alcohol (yes, they technically spit in the mixture). The idea is easy: enzymes in the saliva convert the starch into sugar, than the bacteria feed on sugar and create alcohol. The percentage of alcohol in those drinks is low, but hey, it's a quite creative, although gross, way to make some booze.

A few months ago I ordered a frappacino with coconut milk from the starbucks on my campus and watched as the guy put oat milk in my drink. I’m still salty about it to this day

I like the "plain" homemade oat milk, honestly. I made it before I ever actually tried store-made sweetened oat milk and I find the store-bought stuff nauseatingly sweet.

Fascinating, captain.

I think you can also try malted barley to get some extra enzymes extracted if you dont have easy access to amylase, and barley is usually accessible due to beer production.