Got Mylk?
If you think you’re ready to switch away from dairy, the latest version of the Canada Food Guide will back you up. “Choose protein foods that come from plants more often,” the guide now says. Clearly, the health gods are smiling even more than before on plant-based milks. And no problem there, except that you face an embarrassment of riches.
The global dairy-alternative market was worth $13 billion in 2017. This is forecast to grow by 12.4 per cent annually, so that by 2025 it will be worth $32 billion. And it’s millennials who are driving this change. They are consuming 550 per cent more vegan dairy alternatives than their older counterparts.
If the sheer number of plant-based milk products available in your local food emporium overwhelms you, you are not alone. From nut milks, to soy, rice, coconut, hemp, pea and oat milk — what to choose?
If protein content tops your priorities, then pea and soy milks rank highest, with five to seven grams per serving. Almond milk, on the other hand, has a paltry one gram per serving and coconut milk is little better than flavoured water.
If you’re after the taste and texture of conventional milk, try oat milk. Its creaminess and high fibre content make it the new vegan milk darling.
Of course, some people — sometimes for reasons of taste, sometimes for reasons of health — can’t settle for any of the supermarket offerings. Jessica Lim, founderof Ottawa’s Hippie Mylk, had bad reactions to the usual plant-derived milks that are full of preservatives, thickeners and emulsifiers such as carrageenan, too much sugar, salt and synthetic additives.
“I’ve had health issues all my life,” she says. “Doctors could never really get to the bottom of things. In 2014, I moved to Australia and all my health issues went away. And I realized it was all due to the food.”
Food, says Lim, is much less processed in Australia, due to its year-round growing climate. This means less imported food, fewer preservatives and, for her, better health. “So I began my journey to eat clean. First, I went vegetarian, then, when I began looking at dairy alternatives, I realized that there are so many things I can’t pronounce and didn’t want to put into my body in dairy-alternative milks. That’s when I began to experiment with making my own.”
Apart from the additives she wanted to avoid, she also wanted to have a plant-based product that contained less sugar than some commercial products do. Silk’s very-vanilla flavoured soy, for example, has 16 grams of sugar per one-cup serving. Moreover, she wanted to boost nutritional content in her milk. Some contain less than two per cent nuts, she points out — and she wanted a pure protein level that one can’t obtain with that figure.
If she made her milk herself and sold directly, and quickly, to customers, she could sell fresher milk that wouldn’t need additives to extend shelf life and pump up flavour.
So, in July 2018, Lim founded Hippie Mylk. (The “mylk” spelling distinguishes plant-based milk from the animal-sourced stuff.)
For a test run, she launched at the Westboro Farmers’ Market. Her mylks quickly gained traction and she now sells at the Ottawa Farmers’ Market at Lansdowne Park and by pre-order through NU grocery store on Wellington street.
There are four different Hippie Mylk products — original, original unsweetened, dark chocolate sea salt and turmeric. (Lim’s lineup occasionally features seasonal additions, such as Christmas Grinch mylk, made with microgreens from Backyard Edibles and no sweetener, “because the Grinch is not so sweet.”) She sells approximately 40 litres weekly — with superb nutritional bona fides, each 250-ml glass offering eight grams of protein.
Lim works out of The Cauldron Kitchen, a shared workspace, where she presses and liquidizes her ingredients. Basic ingredients for her mylk include almonds, cashews, hemp hearts, water and Himalayan pink salt. Sweeteners include dates and local maple syrup from Maple Country Sugar Bush in Perth. The hemp is Canadian grown, and she’ll soon develop an oat milk that will use locally grown oats.
The leftover pulp from mylk production becomes the base for Hippie bites — a high-protein cookie snack.
At the moment, Hippie Mylk is sold in glass mason jars of 250- ml, 500-ml or one-litre sizes. Prices range from $7 for 250 ml and $18 for 1L of most mylks. However, since the jars can’t be returned for re-use, Lim is considering biodegradable packing. “I’m really committed to eco-friendly packaging,” she says. Clean food and a clean environment — an admirable consistency there.
Hippie Mylk
hippiemylk.com | @hippiemylk
Find it at: Ottawa Farmers' Market, Nu Grocery (by advance order)
