Uh, MatPat. What are you doing? Just squeezing these cashews
to get the milk out of them Can't you just buy this
stuff from the grocery store? What, do I look like I'm made out of money?
Why would I pay $4.59 for a carton of organic cashew milk from the store when I could just
make my own with $4.29 worth of cashews? There's gotta be a more
convenient way to save money… Oh really? Name one.
Well, I heard that by calling GEICO, in 15 minutes you could save hundreds of
dollars on your car and home insurance. GEICO? sponsor for today's episode? You're telling
me that in 15 minutes, I could be saving 15% on my car or home insurance? That is
awesome! Guess I don’t need this anymore. Get me a phone…and a towel! Hello Internet. Welcome to Food Theory, the show
that won't stop milking the topic of milk. At this point, we’ve talked A LOT about milk…about
how it lobbied to be a part of the food pyramid, how a surplus of the stuff led to massive
underground warehouses full of cheese, and how, in general, humans are biologically programmed
to become lactose intolerant as they get older. And it’s that last one that really brings up an
interesting point that I want to explore today: Milk alternatives. Recently, the demand
for traditional cow’s milk has been on the decline – according to the US Department
of Agriculture, since 1975, milk consumption has plummeted by a whopping 42%. Since 2003, the
number of active dairy farms in the US has dropped by nearly half. Younger generations just don’t
want the stuff. According to the data, Americans born in the ‘90s drink milk less often than those
born in the ‘70s, who, in turn, drink it less often than those born in the ‘50s. So yep, this
is yet another industry that you can blame the millennials for killing, but ah, in truth, they're
really just continuing a trend that started with Gen X. But while dairy milk has been in decline,
non-dairy milk alternatives have been there to pick up the slack: another report found that
between 2013 and 2017, purchases of plant-based milks like almond milk and soy milk increased
by 36%. And that's just scratching the surface: there's also oat milk, coconut milk, cashew milk,
rice, pea milk. Ah, that is P-E-A, in case you thought I was saying something else. Feels like
you can practically milk anything these days. But it also brings up a question: With
so many alternative options available, clearly one has to be the optimal choice, right?
Presumably not all milks are created equally. So, I went out to discover which non-dairy milk option
was the BEST non-dairy milk option. To do that, we assembled a list of the seven most popular
dairy alternatives -- soy, almond, oat, coconut, cashew, rice, and pea -- to pit them head
to head to head to head in order to decide, once and for all, which is optimal answer the
next time the barista at Starbucks rattles off the options that are available or y’know the next
time I’m just walking through the dairy section at the grocery store. Except for one thing, it's not
that simple of an answer. It is rarely that simple of an answer! This "one question" is actually a
variety of different questions because context matters here. Milk is used for a LOT of things
in the food world. You put it in your cereal, it gets frothed into your coffee, it helps you
to bake, it’s used to make stuff like ice cream. The list literally goes on and on. So, if
we’re going to crown the best milk alternative, we’re going to have to look
at a broad spectrum of uses. To do this, we created a list of five major
tests to put our milks through: Nutrition, taste, frothing, baking, and, of course, price since
some of these can get awfully costly. From there, we’re gonna score the results to get
both the individual category winners as well as our overall champion. Because in a
world full of constant choices, isn’t it nice to know, for a fact, that you’re making the BEST
choice? That, my friends, is the Theorist’s Way! Now, obviously the way you get milk from a cow
and the way you get milk from an almond or pea are DRASTICALLY different. In fact, their statuses
as “milks” is kind of in dispute. You see, a “milk,” by definition, is an opaque white
fluid that’s rich in fat and protein made by female mammals for feeding their babies. And
immediately based on that definition it becomes apparent how this might be a problem. Female
plants certainly aren’t mammals, an they’re not secreting white fluid for babies. What we call
non-dairy "milk" alternatives are really just extracts made by soaking and blending plants to
produce opaque white slurries, like we associate with traditional cow or goat milk. White drink
equals white drink therefore MILK. As a result, the Food and Drug Administration has been
concerned that non-dairy products having names like “soy milk” is misleading to consumers.
In the European Union in fact, you can’t actually label a non-dairy product as something like “oat
milk,” instead sellers have been using labels like “NOT MILK - OAT DRINK.” And then in 2018 in the
US, there was even a class-action lawsuit claiming that, quote-unquote “almond milks” shouldn’t be
using the term milk because they are, to quote the filing, “nutritionally inferior.” The shots
were fired but the case eventually got thrown out, but technically they were right about that last
point. Nutrition is one of the areas where, ounce for ounce, plant milks have difficulty matching
the raw efficiency of dairy milk. Traditional cow’s milk is just one of the cheapest protein
sources available with 1 cup of milk offering 8 grams of protein. If you're paying $4 for a gallon
of milk, that means you're getting a whopping 32 grams of protein per dollar. That is a huge amount
of nutrition per buck. Plants, meanwhile. Usually not a great source of protein, and, as you’d
expect, most of the plant milks have less than a single gram of the stuff. Pea milk looks the most
impressive with a whopping 8 grams of protein per glass listed on the nutrition label. That would be
enough to put it on par with dairy milk, at least until you realize that pea protein actually ranks
incredibly low in bioavailability. We’ve talked about that a lot in past videos, but the tl;dr
here is that while pea milk contains a lot of protein, very little of it is actual stuff that
your body can use. Of the seven contenders that we looked at, soy milk stands above the rest. Not
only does it offer 6 grams of protein per glass, but that protein is also much more bioavailable
than anything else. The runner up was cashew milk, with 5 grams of protein roughly 2/3s as
bioavailable as what you'd find in soy. Meanwhile the clear losers of this category were
anything grain-based. Like the oat and rice milks. But protein is only one nutritional reason that
people drink milk. The next one is fat. Now, I know a lot of people actively try to reduce the
amount of milkfat in their diet, preferring to go with skim milks. Trust me, I am more than familiar
with skim. But the thing is, not all fats are created equally, the fat that you find in drinks
like soy milk and cashew milk is monounsaturated fat. When you hear people talk about the "good"
kinds of fat, this is the stuff they're talking about. This is what's gonna reduces the bad types
of cholesterol in your system, and reduce the risk of heart disease. So winning the "highest amounts
of healthy fat" category is cashew milk. Soy, oat, and pea milk all roughly tie for second place.
That said, there's one plant-based milk that is a clear and definite loser in this category:
coconut milk. Coconut milk; absolutely packed with saturated fat, and while you do want some of
that in your diet, too much of it can raise your cholesterol, building up plaque on the insides of
your arteries. This is largely the stuff that you want to avoid if you can help it, and considering
that there are plenty of other milk alternatives you can choose that won’t add it into your diet.
Coconut milk? Definitely at the bottom of our list Last in our nutrition category is calories. Again,
this is a place where some people might be trying to reduce their caloric intake, but we’re saying
higher calories is better since this is purely about getting the most nutritional bang for your
dollar. More calories equals more energy. That said, if you're trying to cut calories, then you
can flip the results of this part. Coming out on top as a clear winner is cashew milk: over
150 calories per cup, followed by oat, rice, and soy milk: all roughly tied for second place.
Down at the bottom of this ranking: Almond milk, with less than ⅓ the calories of cashew milk.
So, at the end of our nutrition round, the clear winner seems to be cashew milk.
It had the highest amount of calories and healthy fat and was the second-best when it
came to protein. Not far behind was soy milk, the far-and-away leader in protein while putting
up decent performances with both healthy fat and energy. Also, you might be wondering why
we didn’t consider calcium or vitamins, these are also reasons why people
drink a lot of milk. The thing is most dairy milks have been specially fortified
to have high amounts of those vitamins. And, most non-dairy milk manufacturers have also
chosen to fortify their drinks to follow suit. Since that’s a big variable that’s actually more
dependent on the brand you’re buying rather than the base nutrition of the mlk that you’re
consuming, we didn’t actually include those here. In general, if you care about the vitamin
amounts, make sure to check the nutrition label. Next up is Category 2: Taste. Now, taste is
obviously subjective, so I wanted to get as big of a data set as I could. In order to do it
I, ah, “volunteered” a bunch of members of Team Theorist for the test. In fact, one person
in particular was VERY eager for their chance to appear on camera. It’s the face reveal
for a very familiar voice over on GTLive. Hello everyone. My name's Ash.
I have a face. That's crazy. Not just a figment of my imagination any more.
Based on our survey results, one immediate trend emerged…cat ears, a lot of people wore cat
ears, there was also a cat Team Theorist, keeping the tradition of cat videos on YouTube
strong! Clearly, we’ve got ourselves a type. But when it came to the important data, another
sort of trend emerged -- oat milk was tops when it came to flavor. Behind oat milk, there was
a near tie between soy and almond, but for two very different reasons. You see, soy milk was
generally well-liked by everyone for its rich, thick, creamy texture. Remember the high protein
and fat content in soy milk we talked about in the last category? Well, it’s something
that you can actually feel on the tongue. I love drinking, like, just straight
soy milk. Cos it's just a good beverage. T-H-I-C-C. Soy.
There’s some fat content here that I feel like I’m getting. Stronger.
You’re getting stronger? It’s, I’m..
What here? No, I mean I’m getting it in a more strong
way than the Almond milk but it feels like a similar fat content to the whole milk You feel it on your throat.
It’s thicc. Almond milk meanwhile had the highest
highs and the lowest lows. In other words, it was the most controversial. In fact, almond
milk got the highest number of "favorite" ratings but was ultimately weighed down by
a high number of “least favorite” ratings I’m going to speak my bias now. This is my mortal enemy. I hate almond
milk. I love almonds, hate almond milk. Like it or hate it, the one thing that everyone seemed to agree about was that almond
milk… it tastes a lot like almonds. Here's my problem with almond milk.
Yes Is that, there is like...bitter at the
end of it. It's sweet, from the nut I shouldn’t have said it like that.
You’re gonna regret that. I’m gonna, I’m gonna. It's sweet.
But then it has a bitter aftertaste, so you finish drinking it and you’re like, ugh. Meanwhile, here's one that
wasn't controversial: Rice milk. Tastes like water! yeah
That's very watery. Oh that's very watery and very white. It was something that I noticed too. Why is
rice milk made to be so dang watery? I actually searched high and low for an official answer,
but the best I could come up with was that rice milk is low in fat and protein and high
in starch – basically the opposite of something like soy milk. It means that instead of getting
"creamy" when you thicken it, it gets sticky, resulting in something more
like porridge than a beverage: remove too much of the water, and suddenly
you don't have yourself a drinkable product, therefore they gotta keep it watery.
Also ranking low in popularity was the pea milk, which maybe gets some bad PR because
of its very unfortunate-sounding name, heck, some brands of pea milk aren't
even willing to call themselves pea milk. Happy days.
I actually think this might be the best milk out of all of them so far
Yeah this is good And if I’m going to be honest,
“pea milk” should never be a thing It just sounds gross.
What a terrible name. Why would you want to drink pee?
I’d change it literally to anything else. So, after two rounds, soy had taken
the overall lead with cashew, oat, and almond as solid runners up. Which
brought us to rounds three and four: Frothing and baking. Because if we’re truly
choosing the one best milk alternative, we wanted to consider all the things that milks
do in our food BEYOND just being milk. How do these alternatives froth in a coffee? How are
they gonna function in your next baking project? For our frothing test we called in our Theorist
expert Jason who actually worked as a barista in a former life. We asked Jason to use the same
process that he would use for a normal dairy milk for the same amount of time for each of our seven
contestants. By doing that, we were able to get the best understanding of which ones were easiest
to build foam with and which ones behaved most similarly to the good ol’ moo-juice. From there,
we then measured how much foam we were able to create as well as how much foam lasted after
sitting there for ten minutes. By doing that, we were able to get a sense of how “stable”
each foam was. And after comparing the numbers, there were two foams that bubbled up to the
top: Oat and Soy. Not only did they provide the most overall foam…each measuring in at over
an inch…but their foams lasted with minimal loss during that duration of ten minutes. They were
also the two easiest to build foam from. Really the main difference came in the flavors each
provided to their respective drinks. Soy, overall, had a very neutral flavor, not really adding
too much to the drink outside of an enriched texture of creaminess. Oat, on the other hand,
added a distinctly oat-y flavor that lingered on the tongue. Meanwhile, rounding out the
bottom three in this category were coconut, then cashew, and finally almond. Almond
especially was bad, developing only an ⅛ inch of foam which immediately dissolved
to ZERO after waiting ten minutes. Now, if you’re paying attention, you’ll
immediately notice that the bottom three here are all the nut-based milk alternatives. And if
you know the science behind what makes foam foam, this result actually makes a lot of sense. Foam
creation depends on two milk components: protein and fat. Not just any protein either, casein
protein–the same one that cools your tongue when you eat something spicy–yup, it’s also responsible
for the foam in your latte. When casein and other proteins are heated, they unfold, or “denature,”
wrapping their long protein-y structure around the air bubbles that are being frothed into
the milk. The more protein that’s present, the more foam you’re gonna see. This is also true
in the milk alternatives, cos those bubbles are being held together by protein. So for milks like
cashew and almond that are only sporting a meager 4 grams of protein, that froth ain’t going
anywhere–there’s nothing to make the bubbles in the first place. Even worse is the low calorie
version of those that also have the fat removed. Fat, similar to protein, helps to stabilize the
milk’s foam bubbles to keep them from collapsing. It’s for this exact reason that baristas prefer
whole milk for things like foam art–it has the same protein as skim milk, but the added
fat is gonna keep the bubbles stable longer, providing a smoother, finer foam consistency.
Sometimes, coffee shops will even have “barista” versions of milk-alternatives where they’ve
added extra fat and protein to something like almond milk to give it the ability to foam. So if
you’re ordering almond milk to skip the fat and calories at Starbucks, think again because they
may have added it right back in for the sake of that foam swan or whatever the thing is on the
top of your cappuccino. For milk alternatives, a winner like soy milk is going to make a lot of
sense here because it’s the only milk of the bunch that has comparable protein to cow’s milk, which
allows it to foam and remain relatively stable. Next, it was on to baking. And here, I’m
not going to bore you with too many details because the results all wound up pretty darn
similar. We tried a non-dairy cookie recipe as well as a non-dairy cupcake recipe to get
a sense of how the milks worked in two very different types of baked goods. And overall
the only major difference between milks seemed to be in the density of the cupcakes. Some milks
were more able to produce a lighter, airy texture, like almond and oat. Others wound up with a more
dense cake, like soy and cashew. That being said, it was a minor difference at best and so it
didn't really factor into the overall totals. Finally, we have to talk about price. To
determine our overall price winner, we looked at the cheapest options for each milk available
from three major retailers and averaged them. From that data we found that almond milk and
soy milk were in a dead heat for the cheapest, each clocking in at about 4 cents per fluid
ounce, or $2.74 per half gallon. Cashew wasn’t that far behind at 5.5 cents and then oat
milk was just under 6. In terms of losers, pea milk was far and away the most expensive,
at nearly ten cents per fluid ounce…a whopping $6+ for a half gallon. That said, it’s not
just about how much you’re paying for a white milky beverage, it’s about the amount of
nutrition that you’re getting for your dollar. When looked from that context, soy was the clear
winner and cashew milk came in second. Overall, it worked out that the most cost-effective milks
were the alt-milks that had been on the market the longest, while the newcomers like pea were the
most expensive, likely because the old guys had more opportunity to figure out cost-effective
solutions for their production. But perhaps the most interesting takeaway of ALL of the
pricing data was that even at their cheapest, no one could actually beat traditional dairy
milk. At just over 3 cents per fluid ounce, dairy milk crushed the competition when it
came to both price AND nutrition per dollar. And with that, it’s time to look at our scorecard.
Overall, when you look at the complete spectrum of nutrition, taste, price, baking, and foaming, the
single BEST milk alternative is…drumroll please Soy milk. It absolutely delivers when it comes to
bang for your buck and it comes in a very close second for both nutrition and taste while the
creamy, rich texture of the stuff makes it great for foaming. In a VERY close second is oat milk.
It was the undisputed winner of both the taste test and the foam test, putting it contention
for that number one spot, but ultimately was held back by lackluster nutritional value and
a middle-of-the-road price. Across all tests, almond milk was probably the most controversial.
If you’re looking for a thin, watery cheap milk substitute, almond is gonna be the one for you.
And while that might sound bad, the low-calories and general lack of creaminess was something many
people on Team Theorist wanted out of a milk. Plus, while it may not foam all that well, it had
steller numbers when it came to baking. By far the unexpected dark horse of the race was cashew milk,
which isn’t even available at a lot of grocery stores, but probably should be considering that
it’s absolutely crushing it in terms of nutrition and delivering good bang-for-your-buck despite
its mediocre taste reviews. And lastly we come to our overall loser: Coconut milk. It got a
dishonorable mention in the nutrition category for being packed with saturated fat, but it’s
also one of the most expensive, people didn’t like the flavor of it, and it doesn’t foam well.
So, there you have it theorists…the DEFINITIVE guide to the best milk alternatives on the market.
The next time Skye, your barista at Starbucks, asks for your milk preference, you can answer
with confidence knowing that you indeed have the correct answer because you’re a Theorist. But hey,
that's just a theory – a FOOD theory. Bon appetit. And thanks again to GEICO for sponsoring
today's episode. Choosing a cheaper milk option isn't the only way to keep more
money in your wallet this summertime: saving money with GEICO is now easier than ever
– emphasis both on "easy" and on "saving money." Because when it comes to things like insurance, I
suspect we all really want things to be as easy as possible:true story, I recently went through the
ordeal of having to say goodbye to a 14-year-old car and then buying a replacement. The process
of trading in an old car and buying a new one; it’s a bit of a hassle, but you know what wasn’t
a hassle? buying insurance for that new car. I was able to get a quote from GEICO and add a brand
new policy right through their mobile app. And not only did GEICO make it easy to insure that new
car, but it made it easy to add that new policy to our existing policy for the family vehicle,
saving me even more money on BOTH. GEICO is fast, easy, and hassle free, and most importantly it
saved me money. If you'd like to find out how easy it could be for YOU to start saving money on your
insurance with GEICO, head on over to the link down in the video description below. Thanks for
watching friends, and I'll see you all next week.
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Team theorist are soy boys confirmed
Oat milk :)
Ahaha pee milk
This just reminds me of that one jack whitehall bit