Sunday, October 2, 2011

Homemade Rice Milk

It's a long story as to why I'm drinking rice milk, but suffice it to say that I believe it's healthier. I don't drink milk for calcium -- in fact, cow's milk isn't really a great source of calcium. In reality, our bodies only absorb about 25% of the calcium available from cow's milk.

But that's a story for another day...

Originally I was drinking Rice Dream when I wanted rice milk. But there are two things I've discovered that I don't like. One: it's not organic. Two: I've seen evidence that Monsanto owns stock in the company that manufactures the product, and I do my best not to knowingly support Monsanto.

So ... I found an online recipe that looked good and made my own!

It really was easy. You take a cup of organic rice:



Wash it thoroughly and put it in a pan with 8 cups of boiling water:



Simmer it for three hours (yes... I said THREE HOURS) until it looks like this:



Then you put it in your blender -- half of the rice mixture plus half additional water (I did two cups rice mixture and two cups of water) and blend:



Eventually, you'll have this (it's a HUGE bowl -- 16 cups -- of pureed rice and water ... "rice milk"). Note how brown it is? I didn't think it would ever actually look like cow's milk at this point.



Strain it twice. I strained it into the blender the first time, then poured it through the strainer from the blender into a pitcher for the last strain.



Here's what's left after you strain:



And HERE is what's left after the second straining -- beautiful, white milk:



So there you have it ... how to make a nice, healthy gallon of rice milk.


The part that was the hardest was straining it ... took me nearly an hour. But it's worth it. This is thicker than the Rice Dream milk (one of my complaints about rice milk was that it was watery) and my next thing will be to add just a little cocoa and honey to make chocolate milk for my coffee.

Happy drinking!