Making oat milk in a portable blender
About 5 minutes · 1 glass (about 280 ml after straining)
Oat milk is the cheapest thing you can make in a blender and one of the few where blending less is better than blending more. It needs two ingredients, cold water, and a shorter blend than instinct suggests. A 350 ml bottle makes roughly one glass, which is the right amount because home-made oat milk does not keep well.
Ingredients
- 40 g rolled oats (a generous quarter cup)
- 280 ml cold water
- A pinch of salt
- Optional: 1 tsp maple syrup, or a drop of vanilla
Step by step
- Cold water first. Pour cold water into the empty bottle. Do not use warm water and do not soak the oats.
- Add the oats. Tip the rolled oats in on top of the water, along with the pinch of salt.
- One cycle only. Seat the bottle on the base, double-click, and let the single 30-second cycle finish. Do not run a second.
- Strain without pressing. Pour through a fine sieve into a glass and let it drain on its own. Pressing the solids pushes starch through.
- Chill and shake. Keep it in the fridge for up to two days and shake before pouring, since it separates as it stands.
The ratio
Four parts water to one part rolled oats by volume. For a 350 ml bottle that is about 40 g of oats — a generous quarter cup — to 280 ml of water. That gives a milk with body rather than the thin, faintly grey liquid you get from a weaker ratio.
Use rolled oats, not instant and not steel-cut. Instant oats are pre-cooked and turn the milk gluey; steel-cut are too hard to break down in half a minute and you will strain most of them out.
Cold water, and why it matters
Use cold water straight from the tap or the fridge. Warm water starts releasing the starch in the oats before the blades ever reach them, and released starch is what makes oat milk slimy. This is the single most common reason a batch comes out unpleasant.
For the same reason, do not soak the oats first. Recipes for nut milks call for soaking because nuts are hard; oats are not, and soaked oats produce a thicker, gluier milk than dry oats blended straight.
One short cycle
Water in first, oats on top, seat the bottle and double-click. Let the 30-second cycle run once and stop there. That is enough to break the oats down; going further keeps shearing starch out of them and the milk thickens and turns slippery.
This is the one recipe on this page where a second cycle actively makes the result worse. If it looks under-blended, strain it and see — most of what looks like whole oat is fine enough to pass through a sieve.
Straining
Pour it through a fine sieve into a glass or a jar. Do not press the solids with a spoon; squeezing pushes starch through and that is the thing you have been avoiding. Let it drain on its own for a minute.
A nut-milk bag gives a cleaner result than a sieve if you have one, but the same rule applies — hang it and let it drip rather than wringing it out.
Flavouring and keeping it
A pinch of salt makes more difference than anything else; it stops the milk tasting flat. Beyond that, a teaspoon of maple syrup or a small date blended with the oats is enough, and a drop of vanilla suits it if you are drinking it on its own.
Home-made oat milk keeps about two days in the fridge and separates as it stands, so shake before pouring. It does not behave like shop oat milk in hot coffee — it can split — so make it for cereal, cold drinks and smoothies rather than for a flat white.
Cleaning up
Oat residue is starchy and sets into a paste, so rinse immediately with cold water first — hot water at this stage cooks the starch onto the bottle.
Then warm water, a drop of dish soap, one 30-second cycle, and unscrew the base to rinse the blade side directly.