Plant-Based Milk: Tiger Nut Milk; is it grrreat?!
The penultimate installment in this series of blogs is all about Tiger Nut Milk! Don’t forget to check out the video of the FoodMarble taste test at the end!
This is the sixth in my series looking at different plant-based and lactose-free milks. The first five I looked at were pea milk, coconut milk, rice milk, almond milk and soya milk.
Tiger Nut Milk is something that I had never heard of before working on this blog (the milk, or the nut), they are however quite popular in Africa and southern Europe. In fact a tiger nut based plant milk has been around since around 1000AD in the Mediterranean and west Africa, called horchata. But what does it look like over one thousand years later?
In terms of ingredients we see spring water, organic rice, organic tiger nuts (6%) and sea salt. This is one of the most “natural” milks in this list, with no stabilisers, emulsifiers and no fortification with vitamins/calcium. Without fortification it will be interesting to see how it compares to dairy milk.
Nutritionally this doesn’t seem like a great alternative; with no mention of calcium content, a significantly higher carbohydrate content and much lower protein content. This milk has a distinct light brown colour, and quite an unique flavour. In the taste test, only one group guessed it correctly — by using the logic that it didn’t taste like anything they had tried before! For IBS sufferers this should be a good alternative; tiger nuts are low FODMAP, as is rice which are the major ingredients.
The FoodMarble Taste Test!
For a bit of fun, I challenged some of the FoodMarble team to a blind taste test, to see how many they could identify. Considering the team, I figured that the best way to get them to try a variety of mystery milks was to mix it with coffee! Indeed, the idea of drinking seven cups of coffee had a lot of my colleagues excited. Each group of two had seven cups of half milk, half coffee placed in front of them and after trying all seven, they guessed each one. They got a point for each correct answer. The milks they tasted were:
Stay tuned for the rest in the series!
Let’s see how they got on!
Just to recap…What are plant-based milks?
Plant milks have been used for centuries, with almond milk and coconut milk used in cooking as early as the 13th century. In fact, a drink made from ground and sweetened tiger nuts called Horchata can be dated back to 1200 AD in northern Africa. These nuts originate from Spain. In modern times Horchata is more widely known as a Mexican rice-based drink, so some simple deduction leads us to the conclusion that the colonists from Spain who arrived in Mexico couldn’t find tiger nuts to make their drink and looked to rice as an alternative. They also added cinnamon to the mix and to this day it remains an incredibly popular drink in Mexico.
Plant milks are made by simply watering down a heated slurry, made by grinding the plant. However modern manufacturers try and re-create the texture and mouthfeel of dairy milk by adding some other ingredients. Depending on the situation some will also be sweetened to give a more pleasant taste.
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