No-udder alternative: Swetha Sivakumar on plant-based mylks

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Milk is temperamental enough. Dealing with plant-based mylks can feel overwhelming.

The process of making them is simple. Almond mylk, for instance, can be made at home, by draining soaked nuts, adding some water, grinding and filtering. A few hours in is where the trouble starts. Solid particles begin to settle at the bottom, irrespective of how finely or for how long the almonds are ground. Meanwhile, try to add an acidic mix such as coffee and it curdles.

To prevent curdling, manufacturers add alkaline salts such as calcium carbonate (INS 170) or baking soda (INS 500 ii), to help counteract acidity. To keep sediment from settling, they use stabilisers such as locust bean gum (which has large, branched molecules) to keep the almond particles suspended in water.

Even something as simple as frothing has to be engineered. Regular milk contains whey proteins that unfold when heated to about 70 degrees Celsius, and hold on to air bubbles. Plant-based mylks don’t have that protein. So manufacturers must add fats such as vegetable oils or emulsifiers like dipotassium phosphate (E340ii). Similarly, for plant-based butter, oil and water must be mixed in an 80:20 ratio, for a creamy, spreadable texture. But oil and water don’t mix unless held together by an emulsifier.

Between the emulsifiers, stabilisers and acidity regulators, it can feel like there’s no way to get a clean sip, spread or bite in this category.

But that’s only because these vegan foods are so new to the marketplace. Companies are already innovating for cleaner solutions. Coca-Cola now offers an almond mylk line called Simply, in which the almond is broken down so finely that only nanoparticles remain suspended in the liquid, eliminating the need for stabilisers.

A UK company called Alt Milk has been able to bump up the almond content from an average of about 3% to as much as 15%, to enable baristas to use the natural fat from the almond to froth coffee with no added emulsifiers. It will take time for these innovations to reach the mass market, but the good news is that the technology is here.

Even vegan cheese is improving, and cheese is perhaps the most complex milk product to replicate. Most commercial plant-based cheeses are made using starches (often tapioca or potato), oils and emulsifiers. These help them imitate the melting factor of regular cheese. But not all dairy cheeses are created equal. A mozzarella, for instance, melts the way it does because of the casein protein in the milk, which cross-links with the calcium to form long fibers when heated. Processed cheese slices achieve melt-ability by blending in whey, but must then add emulsifying salts such as sodium citrate, and preservatives, to increase shelf life.

Rather than imitate these methods, some vegan-cheese producers are drawing inspiration from traditional methods used to create fermented soy products such as miso. They’re using time, temperature control and various bacterial cultures to develop exciting vegan cheese flavours.

I am highly optimistic. After all, there was a time when ketchup couldn’t be manufactured without the preservative sodium benzoate. Then HJ Heinz tinkered with pH levels, created sterile factory floors and cracked the code on shelf-stable ketchup without chemical additives. That was in 1906. We can certainly hope to see similar advancements in plant-based foods today.

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