 I'm going to show you guys how to properly ferment oats. We're going to make two things today. Oat milk as well as a traditional Scottish oat preparation called sowens. Oats are high in phytic acid, aka phytates. These phytates are anti-nutrients that bind to minerals and take them out of the body. If we ferment the oats, we reduce this anti-nutrient content, therefore making the minerals in the food more available, and it's easier on the stomach, so we absorb more of the caloric nutrition. Oats as well as grains in general have been a source of energy in the few recent thousand years. Grains have essentially replaced the wild plant foods that our ancestors consumed. As you can imagine, it's much easier to harvest a field of wheat or oats and ferment them than to gather hundreds and hundreds of different wild plant foods. The main reason for this is accessibility. We might have been able to grow these grains, but these wild plant foods were not present in the environment, so essentially we always consumed animal foods with either grains or plant foods. The ratios were just altered, and the types of food were altered depending on the environment. But I wanted to be clear that this is solely a source of caloric nutrition. Although oats have a higher fat content than other grains, and they're pretty good from an energy standpoint, oats don't contain enough vitamins to be considered a nutrient-dense food. They lack both fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, K2, omega-3 fatty acids, as well as high amounts of vorticiable vitamins. They have some B vitamins, but they lack vitamin B12, vitamin C. This traditional preparation of oats called sowens originated from the Scots. They would harvest the oats in the field, they would mill them into a powder, and then they would mix this powder with water. They would let it sit for about a week. The natural wild yeast in the air would ferment it, and then what they would do is they would take this container full of water and oats. They would pour the water off and actually discard the oats. That water would then be let to settle, and there would be these tiny sediments that would settle to the bottom of that water. That was deemed the most nutritious part of the oat, similar to maybe cream of wheat or cream of rice, the highest quality source of nutrition. As you can imagine, the yield is not too high, but those oats that they threw out, we will be using those today for oat milk, utilizing all of it, and I mean oats are cheap in general, even organic oats are like a dollar forty-nine a pound, so even if the yield is low, it's not too expensive considering their initial price. So let's get started. Oats. This is called the groat, and groats are just pretty much oats in their whole form. Wheat is called a wheat berry. Wheat berries look similar to this, but basically all grains are seeds and they have to be milled into flour. So what we need to do here is we need to soak these oats in water, and then we're going to blend them up, because if we don't soak them, they're going to be too hard to blend up, and milling is much more labor-intensive. The scots did not have blenders. I'm sure they would have loved to soak the groats, blend them up in a blender, and not have to grind them in a mill. But normally, traditionally speaking, in order to grind up a seed, you need some sort of stone mill that's pretty hard to engineer and operate, especially in comparison to a blender. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to fill this up with the oats, and get half of them on my counter. I'm going to just fill this up with reverse osmosis water. Reverse osmosis is a form of filtration that removes fluoride and chlorine. So now we just have a blender that's half full of oats. I'm going to let this sit for probably four, five, six, seven hours overnight would even be good. And then these will be soft enough so that when we blend them up, it turns into more of a puree as opposed to chunks of oats. If you want to, you can use steel cut oats as well as Scottish oats. So those groats we just looked at, that's the original form. Steel cut oats are those groats cut into smaller pieces, and Scottish oats are the powdered form of the groats. You don't really see Scottish oats a lot. I think I have some on my Amazon shop, and you can buy Scottish oats on Amazon. It's just a very labor-intensive process in compared to doing this. But you can get them if you'd like. And I just find having the oats whole and doing this is much fresher. Even when I make my own bread, I like grinding the wheatberries myself. It really makes it a higher quality product. And just by using the whole berries, imagine if we had it fresh from the field. Imagine how much more aromatic and tasty it would be. So we'll check on this in a couple of hours, and we'll go for a ride in the blender. So it's been about eight hours. Now we're going to blend this up. Boyo Boyo, wouldn't a vegan cream their pants at the side of this? Pureed oats and water. Yum. So as you can see, the texture here isn't too fine. So all we're really going to do is put it in a pot, and then this slop, aka gruel, is just going to ferment for a week on the counter. And once we have the fermentation done, we'll have a low phytic acid slop that we can then use for nourishment. So this is the oat water mixture. It's been sitting in this pot for about a week. Hard to describe the smell of this. It's a lot like yeast, very yeasty. Smells like bread, baked bread, brioche, but pretty much toasty bread, yeasty notes. So now make sure not to disrupt this too much. What we're going to do is just pour the water off the top. And as you can see, that oat mixture is at the bottom. That's what we don't want. It's okay if a little bit of it comes into this, but for the most part, we just want that water on top. So this, although yes, it does not look like much, this will be our sowns in the end. So I'm actually going to put the sowns liquid in a jar. I think it's going to be easier to see the separation. Once this settles to the bottom, we'll be ready to cook. What's left over is what we're going to make into oat milk. So what I'm going to do is add some water to this. We're going to boil it to kill all the bacteria, and then we're going to strain it to have our oat milk. So you might be thinking, just bring it to the boil to kill the bacteria, but boiling also reduces the anti-nutrient content and makes the calories more available. So five, 10 minutes, maybe a light boil, high simmer, and then we'll be good to strain this into our oat milk. Guys, I've burned oats every time I've gone to cook them. You have to be really careful. I salvaged it, but if you put this on a high heat and leave it for a minute, the bottom will burn. So make sure to be super careful and stay close by and stir it. It's only five, 10 minutes of boiling. The world's not going to end. You can sit here on your phone and stir while you're on your phone. As I've been cooking this, the oats are soaking up a lot of water. So I'm probably going to be adding a couple more cups of water before this is done. As I've been cooking this, I'll probably have to add a couple of cups of water because it's getting like cement. It is. And what is it? It's, I'm making oat milk. But it doesn't smell good. Well, I gotta attract vegan girl. What the hell's in it? It's oats, it's just, it's fermenting oats. It's not a food. It's fermenting oats. How am I going to get the vegan girls? Yeah. Without the fermenting oats. They smell worse than this. How do you carry it on the stick? If I can't tolerate this. How do you carry it on the stick and put it on the hood of your car? I carry it. I can't breathe when I do this. It's not that bad. Oh fuck, I can miss that mixing. It's fine. We'll throw it in the blender and we'll have our oat milk. So I've been stirring this for about 10 minutes on a high heat. I actually had to add another 10 cups of water because it got so thick. Now I'm just going to let this cool off. And we'll throw it in the blender and strain it. One of our slop variations have finished cooling off being the oat milk. So this is the byproduct of the sowns that we just boiled for about 10 minutes and added a lot of water to. It's very gelatinous and thick. So I'm probably going to add quite a bit of water to this blender. So in here I have two parts oat sludge to one part water. We want a really thick, heavy nut milk. Okay, so here I have a strainer with some cheesecloth. Trust me guys, I didn't go out and buy cheesecloth for this crap. I haven't already. This looks pretty promising. And in front of you guys thinking, oh, this is a lot of work for some oat milk. That's why the Oatly factory has like millions and millions of dollars worth of high tech equipment to make this. It's a highly automated process, but I don't even know if the Oatly factory is fermenting their oat milk. So safe bet if you are consuming a lot of nut milk to make it yourself. So on the strainer, I guess some of the larger particles that aren't going through. So the texture of this nut milk is very creamy. I would say it's probably as thick as like full fat sheet milk or something. I mean, honestly, it tastes like what it is. It tastes like you've boiled some fermented oats and strained them out. It doesn't taste good. It's very sour. It has a slight oat flavor. Would this be okay in a coffee? Maybe, definitely not on its own. But since we're a vegan, we wouldn't be consuming something without adding unnecessary amounts of seasoning to it. So let's add some Stevia and vanilla extract to this to see what it tastes like. You know what this tastes like? When I did a vegan day of eating video, I had this coconut yogurt that was vanilla flavored. This tastes pretty much the same as that. So if you make your own oat milk, you add some vanilla extract to it, artificial sweetener. I mean, it's probably way healthier than the store-bought version. And I'm assuming it tastes just as good. So here is the sowns. It's been resting for about a day. You can see the sediments on the bottom. We could let this rest for another day or two and the yield will be much higher, but the video's gotta come out tomorrow, boys. So we're gonna cook what we have in here now. All right, so the water's poured off and I added a bit more water. And what we want is two-part water to one part of the sediments. And it's just going to go into a pot on a medium heat and we're gonna boil this for about 10 minutes. Okay, so the sowns has been simmering away for about 10 minutes and it's pretty much done. And as I said earlier, this is like baby cereal almost. Very similar in look and texture. And the way the Scottish would have made it is they would have put a bunch of heavy cream in it. Here I have some raw cream from a local farm, raw grass-fed, completely different food than the stuff you get from the supermarket. And I'm also gonna put in a pinch of salt. Okay, I'm just gonna stir up the cream into the sowns. This is pretty much looks like some sort of white soup. You can mix butter into this, maybe a little bit of honey too, but this is the traditional preparation. At most they would have added, you know, a tablespoon of cream and a pinch of salt. From a culinary perspective, I think this actually tastes really good. You have the sourness of the oats. It's mellowed out a little bit by the cream and the salt really brings the natural flavor of the oats and the cream out. I mean, it's pretty good. Now, I mean, yeah, the only reason this tastes good is probably because we added dairy to it, but I'm gonna put in like a tiny, tiny drizzle of honey and see how much of a difference it makes. And hey, screw what, I'm adding honey, I'll put some cinnamon in there as well. Whenever I make a food, although I might like it myself just with the cream and the oats, I think from a very approachable perspective, you know, would a kid like this? Would an average American like this? And although I like that original preparation, I'm not quite sure the average person would. Yeah, you add just a tiny bit of honey, half a teaspoon and some cinnamon to this and this would be great for kids. Really good, really, really good. Hopefully this helps some of you guys prepare some foods in a traditional way to give your family a healthy and nutritious meal. Thank you guys for watching. If you can, please like, subscribe, hit that bell icon and share the video. If you guys do wanna support the channel, just check out a bunch of the videos that I link at the end here. I do have another video on oat preparation where I go a little bit deeper into the anti-nutrients and what's wrong with them and a whole bunch of other cooking videos ranging from iron corn dough to some more carnivore-oriented recipes. You guys enjoy the rest of the weekend.