Natural Creamer

So after finding an acceptable alternative to my beloved Splenda in this post, I got down to the other part of my coffee ritual - creamer. At this time, my office has no refrigerator so that means no regular creamer or almond milk. For a while that meant powdered artificial creamer: full of preservatives, chemicals and lyophilized fat. I'm not one to poo poo all kinds of artificialness, the way our world is today, it's hard to get away from it. My proposal is to control the things I can, which is my coffee creamer, something I have 2 cups of every day. The cheetos I eat every now and then? Totally artificial and I love them, but I don't eat them that often, so I'm ok with that.

After a brief look a the resources on the internet, I found very little - use powdered milk, which I have very few horrible memories from childhood and powdered milk is one of them. The few times we ran out of regular milk my mother tried to substitute reconstituted milk in it's place. BLEH. Powdered milk has a very distinctive aftertaste and I wasn't sure if my coffee would be able to cover it. I looked online and found powdered rice milk and was determined to find a way to make this work.

 

 

I also happened to have protein powder and decided to try that as well. I tried different combinations of things:

• just milk - bleh, there's that aftertaste
• just rice - ok, but grainy
• 1/2 milk, 1/2 rice - better, the aftertaste is covered up, still kinda grainy
• 1/2 protein, 1/2 milk - ok, still some solubility issues
• 1/2 protein, 1/2 rice -  ok, not as soluble
• 1/2 protein, 1/4 rice, 1/4 milk - ok

I added pumpkin pie spice to the mix for flavor but in the end may have added to my grittiness issues. In general, I liked the creaminess from the milk and I liked the flavor of the rice (it had vanilla added as well). So a 50:50 mix of rice to milk seems to be the best here but in terms of solubility, still does not stand up to that artificial stuff. Time to bring in the reinforcements:

spoon vs. frother

I decided a milk frother would provide the necessary agitation to help with my solubility problem plus there is the added benefit that it actually froths powdered milk!

It's not the best thing ever, but it's not the worst. I've been drinking this in my coffee for about a month now and I'm used to it. So for the time being, I get frothy coffee with natural sweetener and powdered milk. It's growing on me. I also feel pretty good about myself for taking this small step away from artificial and toward natural. Now I need to figure out what to do with these...