How to Pair Vegan Milk with Coffee
How to Pair Vegan Milk with Coffee
A study from Simply Healthy Vegan found that 12% of Irish people prefer to follow a vegan diet.
This naturally raises the question of which plant based milks are the best to have with coffee.
Here we are going to look at what the best plant based milks are to add to coffee and evaluate how well you can steam these vegan milks to make latte and cappuccino.
What Does Plant Based Milk Need to Go Well With Coffee?
We started drinking coffee with dairy milk as far back as 1684. Milk goes so well with coffee because its fats give the drink a fuller texture and soften some of its more bitter notes.
Milk’s blandness also ensures that it won’t overpower coffee’s more subtle and complex notes.
A plant based coffee therefore needs to have a decent amount of fat (at least 1.5%) and a neutral flavour in order to complement coffee.
You also want your milk to be resistant to splitting under heat.
Certain plant based milks just cannot be poured into a hot coffee without splitting, and this will give your drink an unpleasant grainy texture. Plant based milks that split in this way should be avoided.
The table below shows the flavour profile, fat content, sugar content, protein content and splitting temperature of all the common plant based milks:
Which Plant Based Milks are the Best To Add to Filter Coffee or Americano?
The best non-dairy milks to add to filter coffee are pea milk and cashew milk. However, these two milks are not always that easily available.
The next best options are either oat milk, almond milk or soy milk.
Pea milk and cashew milk are excellent options for filter coffee because they have close to the same fat content as dairy milk. This means that they have the same textural effects on coffee as dairy milk.
Pea milk is slightly better for coffee than cashew milk because of its higher splitting point.
You want to let your coffee cool off a bit before adding cashew milk to avoid any risk of splitting.
Soy milk is the next best option because it also has a high level of fat.
Soy milk’s big downside is that its splitting temperature is only slightly above coffee’s ideal drinking temperature (55 Celsius). You therefore need to add your soy milk to your coffee just before you drink it.
Almond milk and oat milk can work in filter coffee, but their lower fat content means that you’ll likely need to pour a bit more of them into your coffee to achieve your desired texture.
I’d avoid coconut milk and rice milk in coffee.
Coconut milk’s flavour does not go well with coffee at all, and rice milk just does not have the fat content that gives you the textural changes that you want when you add milk to coffee.
What is the Best Plant Based Milk For Steaming and Frothing?
Plant based milks with high protein and sugar content steam the best.
Steaming milk involves stretching out its proteins. If a milk does not have much protein then it won’t expand in volume.
Steamed dairy milk is sweet because the steaming process breaks down its lactose into simpler sugars. The simpler these sugars become, the sweeter they taste.
Plant based milk needs to be high in natural sugars to match this sweet flavour.
By far the best plant based milk for steaming is oat milk.
Oat milk has enough protein that it will expand in volume when steamed and is the only milk that can taste anywhere near as sweet as dairy milk after steaming.
The second best option here is pea milk, also because of its high protein content. However you will need to add sugar to this in order for it to taste similar to steamed dairy milk.
Although soy milk has a high protein content, it cannot handle the exposure to heat involved with steaming. It’s liable to split and go all grainy as you attempt to steam it.
What is the Deal With Barista Milks?
In the last few years we’ve started to see a range of “barista milks” which are designed to be steamed for milk based coffee drinks like latte and macchiato.
These are just oat milk which have been combined with additional plant based fats and proteins.
They steam really well and are a better choice than standard oat milk for steaming.
Just bear in mind that these have significantly more fat in them than standard plant based milks so if you are cutting out dairy for health reasons then these may not be the best options.
Final Thoughts
The best plant based milks to add to filter coffee are pea milk, cashew milk and soy milk.
The best plant based milk for steaming is oat milk. If you can get your hands on barista oat milk then even better as this steams very similarly to dairy milk.
If you’d like to find out more about what Dreambeans has to offer, please check out some of our coffee blends.