 Hi, I'm Chef Nini Nguyen and today I want to make sense of milk alternatives, whether you're making a recipe and you run out of milk or you want to avoid milk and dairy completely. Here are some things that you'll need to know. So let's look at some of the non-dairy alternatives that I have right here. I want to start with soy milk. It can be used for sweet and savory cooking. Next we have oat milk. So with oat milk it's normally a little bit thicker and it has a very, very neutral flavor. Whenever you're using it in a sauce you definitely want to put this at the end of the recipe because it does like to curdle. Now for rice milk, rice milk is going to be a lot thinner and you want to always shake up your milks before using it. But you can see it's nice and white just like milk but way, way thinner. It has no fat and rice milk is kind of sweet and so I would either use it for a light soup with already sweet ingredients like a butternut squash soup or I would just stick to the desserts. Alright, last but not least coconut milk. Coconut milk is going to be thicker than regular milk. It's creamier, it has a lot more fat because coconut is such a delicious flavor and it's fatty and rich. It's really, really good in spicy dishes. Some desserts. Here I have a simple pancake recipe made with regular whole milk and one with the oat milk substitute. So I'm going to do oat milk on the left. The bat you can already see the difference in the texture of the batter themselves. The milk one is a little bit thicker, the oat milk is a little bit thinner and it kind of spreads out. So I'm going to flip this over. Look how pretty. This one's rising, the bubbles are a little bit bigger but this one's rising pretty well for a milk alternative. Now let's see how the milk one turned out. Now the milk one is definitely rising a lot higher than our oat milk. And I can tell right now the edges of the milk pancake is going to be a little bit crispier. So for the oat milk, let's cut it open. It's a little chewier, you can kind of see how it pulls. The pancake itself is a little flatter but it's still pretty fluffy and it doesn't taste bad, it tastes pretty good. It's not as fluffy as this one. Now let's give it a taste. The other one you can kind of see when you pull it, it's a little chewier, this one looks a lot more tender. It's definitely lighter, the caramelization is great and it's very very soft but I wouldn't be mad at any of these. So we have some dairy alternatives that are really really easy to substitute for milk, like yogurt. So yogurt is thicker and it has like a creamy tangy taste and you can definitely substitute yogurt for milk. Now since it is tangy, you can add a little bit of sugar or butter, the sweetness kind of counter or offsets the tanginess. And you want to make sure you're using clean yogurt. You do not want to use like vanilla but this is really great for say mac and cheese or any baked good. I find it adds a little tang that makes things kind of taste better. And now we can talk about sour cream. Sour cream is very similar to yogurt in the sense that it's very very thick and creamy. It has a higher fat content so you definitely don't need to add butter but you can add a little sweetener if you want it to be less tangy. Now we have evaporated milk and evaporated milk is basically reduced milk. There is a good amount of sugar in evaporated milk so you want to be careful on what recipe you decide to use to substitute evaporated milk for fresh milk. Now in a pinch if you don't have anything else you can use water. Your dish won't be as creamy and your baked goods will not rise as it should but you can add a tablespoon of butter to a cup of water to kind of replace that fat that the milk would have contributed. All of the substitutions I've introduced to you today can be used for a one to one ratio. So a cup of milk will be a cup of thinned out evaporated milk, thinned out yogurt, a cup of coconut milk or oat milk whatever you like. Alright now let's go back to the pancake test. So here I have a yogurt batter and then I have a milk batter. Alright so let's see how this looks. Perfect, nice golden brown. Now I'm going to flip the yogurt one. Brown as well so because our substitute was yogurt which also has lactose it does create the nice golden color that you want and it's just as fluffy as the milk one. Alright let's try the regular pancake first. Alright, nice tender, crumb, fluffy, soft. I just love how golden brown it is. Let's look at the yogurt one. It's pretty tender, it kind of pulls a little bit when I try to break it apart but it's really fluffy. It has a slight tang to it but I'm not mad about it because I love a little tang in my pancake anyways. The flavor is very very similar. It's a lot closer than the oat milk. If you were really to compare if you had this at the same table I don't think that people would think that these are two different batters. So I hope that these tips can help you out whether you're in a pinch or if you're trying to become a vegan but either way embrace experimentation and don't stress. Cheers.