Is Oat milk bad for you?

Okay, so here's a conundrum. Why does oat milk taste sweet and drinkable? Think about it. If you were to cook oatmeal without anything else in it, it's pretty boring and it isn't really naturally sweet. Now, the plot thickens when we look at a package of oat milk, like Oatly. If you look at the nutritional label, we can see that there's seven grams of added sugar. But if we look at the ingredients, none of these are really types of sugar. Well, that's kind of odd, but how do we even make oat milk to begin with? Okay, so then why don't we just look up the recipe? I mean, it can't be that hard, right? If we look at most recipes online, it's a total mess. Clicking the top recipes, people suggest using things like brown sugar and vanilla, two things we don't see on the Oatly label. Some recipes claim that it should just be oats, water, and salt. Okay, so the sugar must be coming from the oats. But if we look at the nutritional label here, there isn't sugar here either. So why is there no added sugar on the oats, but there is on the Oatly? What the heck is going on here? Well, the answer actually got Oatly in a bit of hot water with the American Food and Drug Association, forcing them to alter their nutritional labels and add that extra seven grams of added sugar. This is also the reason why most recipes online you're gonna find for oat milk are flat out wrong. Okay, so to figure out what's going on, let's make oat milk according to one of these recipe blocks. Now for this, we're gonna need one cup of old fashioned oats and we're gonna need six cups of water. And then lastly, we're just gonna need a little bit of salt for flavor. Place all this into a blender and give it a whirl. And then just blend this until it's completely smooth. And then we're gonna need to strain it. So I'm gonna do that using a nut milk bag. Now it's generally advised not to overly squeeze the bag because that can lead to a slimy oat milk. Now that I have some oat milk, if I do a taste test comparison between the commercially available Oatly and the oat milk I just made, the homemade oat milk is pretty darn gross. In fact, it doesn't really even have a discernible flavor. It just kind of tastes like if somebody was trying to design something that didn't have any flavor, like that gruel they eat in The Matrix. Now comparing this to the Oatly is a whole nother thing. It tastes creamy, it's ever so slightly sweet, and it has a really compelling and delicious flavor. Okay, so what is Oatly doing? Why does the oat milk that they have taste good and the ones according to the recipe blogs taste not so good? Well, to answer that, we're gonna have to do a little science. When a plant makes a seed, it needs to make sure there's enough energy in that seed for it to be able to sprout and make leaves so that the plant can be self-sustaining. So to do this, the mother plant stores all of the energy in the form of what's known as starch. Now starch is the plant's equivalent to fat and it's made of a bunch of sugars that are linked together in a giant chain. When we consume cooked starch, our body will break down these long chains back into sugar, which our body will use for energy. And oatmeal is just a flattened seed, so it's full of starch. After cooking oatmeal, we basically have a bowl of starch, which is more or less flavorless. But one thing we can do is we can break down that starch into sugar before it even goes into our mouth. And this can be done using enzymes. Basically the same stuff that our body's doing inside when we actually eat the oatmeal. And all this enzyme's gonna do is basically just cut up the starch into its sugary building blocks. And this is what Oatly and other oatmeal companies have been doing. Basically they're pre-processing it so that it tastes sweet to us and then therefore it's more palatable. Now I know that sounds pretty crazy and it seems like you need a lab to do it, but in reality, it's actually a pretty simple process. So let's just actually do it ourselves. The only thing that we really need is the enzyme itself to break down the starch. Okay, so the name of the enzyme that we're gonna be using is known as amylase. And it's relatively easy to find online. I got this giant bag from Amazon for a few bucks. Now it comes in this powder form and really it's a huge bag and we're only gonna need a very small amount of it. And also it can be found in our mouth. Our saliva actually contains amylase and when you eat something that's starchy, your body will start to break it down in your mouth before it even gets to your stomach, giving a little bit of a headstart. Cool. Before we even do that though, we're gonna need some starchy oat water. Now to do this, we can basically use the same recipe from before. However, this time we're gonna need to cook it. Okay, so just place your one cup of rolled oats into your six cups of water and we're just gonna cook this until basically the oatmeal is, and the grains themselves are soft. What we're really doing here is we're just hydrating the actual grains of starch. And the reason for that is starch is actually kind of stored in these granules, which are kind of hard to actually access. What we're doing by cooking them is actually causing water to get into these granules, which will swell the granules up and then cause them to explode, releasing the starch all over the place. This process is known as gelatinization. And this is why actually oatmeal really thickens. What happens is all of those chains link up with each other and makes it harder to stir. Also, this is fundamentally why we need to cook starches before we can eat them. And that's why you get sick if you eat uncooked rice or uncooked potatoes or uncooked flour. All right, so now that we have our cooked bland oatmeal, we need to add in our amylase. Now enzymes work best at very specific temperatures and pHs. And thankfully we don't have to worry about pH here, but the enzyme will work a lot more efficiently at a higher temperature than room temperature. And that temperature turns out to be between 162 degrees Fahrenheit and 167 degrees Fahrenheit. Now in reality, since we just cooked it, we need the temperature to actually drop down to below 167 degrees. Otherwise, if we stir it in right now, it will denature our amylase and basically just won't work at all. So I just let it kind of cool down to 167 degrees Fahrenheit and then I thought this is a perfect opportunity to use my sous vide circulator. I set that to 165 degrees Fahrenheit, placed the oat product into a jar and then just kind of heated up a bath of water around it with the circulator. So once the oat stuff has kind of cooled down to the point where it's not going to kill our enzyme, we can go ahead and add that in. So I'm just gonna measure off about five grams or about a teaspoon's worth of the alpha amylase from this little bag here. And then it's just a matter of dumping it in and give it a good stir. And I mean, that's pretty much all we have to do, except for just let it sit at this temperature. So I decided to put a thermometer in here just to keep track of the temperature, but basically all we need to do is sit and the enzyme will do all of the magic for us. Now you can let this sit from anywhere from 20 minutes up to an hour. Now, because I was being a little bit extra, I let mine go for the full hour, but you know, it's up to you. And now, regardless of how long you let it sit in for, it's time to take it out. Now, at this point, we should have a pretty sweet oat milk. Now's the point where we can actually make the oat milk. And basically we're just gonna repeat what we did at the beginning of this video. So I'm just gonna give everything a nice solid blending and make sure that we have a nice smooth oat mixture. And then basically we're just gonna run that through the nut milk bag again and just collect as much of this delicious stuff as possible. And this should be now our closer version of oat milk. Now I just put this in the fridge to cool down and blammo. Doing a very quick taste test, it tastes pretty good. Now I know it's not 100% oat leaf, but it's honestly extremely drinkable and it has that same subtle sweetness. Now the reason that mine doesn't quite taste like oat leaf is because I think that they do an additional process to their oat milk, which is adding another enzyme. So today's video really only scratched the surface of enzymes and starch and all of that fun stuff. So if you wanna learn more about that, I recommend checking out my video on how to make bread because I really go really into depth a lot more than I do in this video about how starches work, how enzymes work, and in that case also how yeast works and how it ferments sugar into making bread. Other than that, if you don't feel like watching that video, feel free to subscribe. I have some really cool stuff coming out soon. I have a very adventurous video that I've been working on and hopefully that will be coming out sometime soon. All right, well, that's it for this week and I will see you guys soon.