The Nutr Helped Me Quit Whole Milk
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I love milk. I talked about it when I compared this Nutr to its competitor, the Almond Cow, I’ll talk about it again here. My parents grew up drinking raw milk, and I grew up drinking like two glasses of (pasteurized) whole milk a day. Fucked up, I know, but I won’t apologize for it.
Then last year, I moved in with my girlfriend, who—along with being beautiful, smart, and kind—is lactose intolerant. Once I started sharing meals everyday, I just decided it was time to join the 21st Century and give up on cow’s milk.
And I’m not some reactionary that’s going to complain about giving up cow’s milk, but I will say none of the alternatives really ever did it for me. My lattes were a bit duller. My mac'n'cheeses fell flat. My quiches lost that je ne sais quoi. I’d lost the color of full-fat dairy. It was dairy in black and white. (Don’t tell me it was psychosomatic, I don’t believe you.)
The Nutr changed that. After a few days of toying with recipes, I got the perfect batch of oat milk: Sweet without being sugary, creamy but not thick, still actually tasted like oats. The latte was perfect. And now I don’t think I’m going back.
Really good alt milk, without additives
As a whole milk lover, I just couldn’t really get behind how watery most store-bought alternative milks are. In taste, they’re fine. I stopped drinking milk by the glass in high school anyway… But that watery texture was always a bummer. When you’re cooking, baking, or just adding it to a coffee, it never hit the same. I could never get it right blending milks on my own, but with the Nutr, it took a week of playing with recipes to find that perfect consistency: Add more dry ingredients, cut back on water, blend on a warm or hot cycle, none of it was rocket science, but I made an almond milk that could put Califa out of business.
It’s those heat settings that really distinguished the Nutr from the Almond Cow when we initially pitted the two against each other. Once I got my ingredients down, I would blend on warm, and the milk came out so incredibly smooth. (I might have been drinking it by the glass at this point.) The additional heat really gets a proper emulsion, and you can nail that creamy milk consistency with no effort. Using alternative milk instead of regular milk in recipes is a lot less painful now, and it gives you ultimate control over the type of milk you are getting.
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Control your ingredients
And in terms of controlling what you get here, you’re also fully in charge of what exactly goes into your milk. I’m generally OK with the ingredients list on my recyclable box of alternative milk. It’s longer than “milk,” but I’m eating Popeyes like once a week currently, so I’m not going to freak out about the seed oils hiding in my Oatly. But! If you are a close inspector of the ingredients list—especially if you’ve got allergies or sensitivities—you get full control over what’s in your glass. As result, I started to feel oddly connected to my milk… Knowing what that extra date does to my oat milk or the best ratios for proper coconut milk, it’s like knowing the temperament of a dairy cow (I imagine). This is how my parents felt when they had to get up at five on a Saturday morning to milk their family cow (I imagine).
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You can save a lot of money
Stick with me here. Let’s assume you buy oat milk by the half-gallon. Reasonable, no? Nutr’s oat milk recipe has you use two tablespoons of oats, one cup of water, a pinch of salt, and the sweetener of your choice (my sweetener typically being one medjool date). Making one cup of milk every cycle, you need to make eight batches of this recipe to hit a half-gallon. At my local Whole Foods, a half-gallon of Oatly is $5.99, and 30 ounces of steel cut oats run you $4.79.
After eight batches of oat milk—a full half-gallon—we had roughly half the container of oats left. So, you’re looking at around $2.45 or $2.50 for a half-gallon of milk, being generous with the price of salt, water, and a date. With those numbers, you’re saving over 50 percent per half-gallon of milk you’re buying. Extend that out over a year of grocery runs—add in all the times you might be baking and need a one-off of creamer—and it can add up into the triple digits pretty quickly. So for the frugal shoppers among us, your Nutr basically pays for itself within the year.
Shop Now $189, thenutr.com
Best of all? It actually looks good.
Lastly, and dare I say most importantly: The thing actually looks good. There are too many ugly kitchen gadgets out there, but the Nutr is not one. It comes in white or black with a rose gold accents, and both are worthy of being on display. But if you want to store yours away, it’s small enough to slip into any cabinet or pantry space and easily do so.
Look wise, it’s perfect. Size wise, it’s perfect. And performance wise, it's perfect. What more do you want?
Shop Now $189, thenutr.com
Photography by Timothy Mulcare. Prop styling by John Olson for Halley Resources.
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