Toothsome Tuesday

I’ve been experimenting with dairy substitutes. I discovered in the early 1990s that I was cow’s milk intolerant. Sheep and goat cheese are fine for me, and I use goat milk in my morning coffee. My husband can’t handle dairy very well either so when I need milk or cream or butter I use a substitute.

Some, like almond milk, are really good.
Others, like rice milk, are pretty good.
Cashew cream is wonderful. It’s thick and rich and creamy and is absolutely amazing on pumpkin pie. I’d live on it except for a really swell allergic reaction to cashews. I can live with it, though, and corn and pineapple do the same thing to me.

Tofu makes a good cream, especially if it’s in with a bit of tahini (sesame paste). Tahini is good on it’s own as a cream or thinned as a milk, and if mixed with a bit of coconut lard it makes a lovely butter substitute in baking.

Yesterday I made oat milk. The recipe called for simmering oats for an hour then draining off the water. Said water formed the milk. It’s quite slimy and smells like pasta water. The taste is okay.
I mashed some in potatoes. The taste was okay, but the consistency was gluey. I mixed a bit of sugar and vanilla in and used it on cobbler-crisp-bread pudding thing I’d thrown together a few days earlier. This was very tasty, but again, the consistency is very off-putting.

The leftover oats gave me an idea so I made up some fake cream cheese with tofu and, once everything had been around long enough to develop flavor, I made fake cheesecake. The cooked rolled oats became the cottage cheese called for in the recipe I was abusing, and I threw in some of the oat milk for liquid.
I insulted a second recipe so this is both a hybrid and an invention. Those are the best.
Said cheeseless cake is resting comfortably in the fridge now. I want to make sure it gets plenty of time for the flavors to gather.

Meanwhile, I found the formula for making potato milk. It will be today’s experiment. It sounds like I need to boil a potato and then blend it in its boiling water. It certainly sounds easy. But how will it taste? And is it something I’d want to dunk a cookie in?
Stay tuned.