Homemade Rice Milk

 Last week I tried my latest adventure.  I decided to try making my own rice milk.  It is costing us a fortune to provide soy or rice milk for our one year old.  He's the one who is allergic to nuts, eggs, wheat and dairy.  His food options are very limited.  Our local grocery store carries about 10 different varieties of Almond or Coconut milk (he's allergic to both) and only gets one case a week of Silk soymilk - priced at nearly $5/half gallon.  I can drive to Jackson Hole (77 miles north) or Rock Springs (100 miles south) and Eighth Continent or Simply Organic for half as much.  Problem is, it's not free to drive there, and I need to buy in bulk so I can make fewer trips ... but then where do I store it?  I was keeping it in the garage, where it was as cold as a refrigerator, until the temperature started getting so cold it would freeze.  (It's supposed to get to 15 below zero tonight).  When soymilk freezes, it gets chunky ... and something about it changes and the baby reacts to it just as he does to the things he is allergic to.  I hadn't really even thought about it being possible, but when I was looking on Amazon to see if I could buy a powdered version of something he could drink, I read a review in which someone talked about  making their own rice milk.  So I googled it can came up with a very simple recipe.  Simple, but very time consuming.

It basically amounts to boiling one cup of long grain brown rice in 8 cups of water.  You bring it to a boil, then cover and leave on simmer for three hours.  Then, fill the blender with equal amounts of the boiled rice mixture and water, and puree until as smooth as possible.

I just turned it on and let it run for a few minutes.

Then strain the liquid.

And pour it into a clean container.  The baby wasn't thrilled with it at first because it's definitely not as sweet.  So I mixed it half and half with soymilk so he can adjust to it.  I also added sugar (1/4 cup for a gallon of rice milk) to some of it, but he hasn't tried the sugared stuff yet.  The site where I found the recipe (which I can't find right now) said they sometimes add maple syrup to theirs.  I may try that, depending on how he likes the sugared version.

Anyway, it worked out well, and I figured it cost me about 50 cents to make nearly two gallons (I doubled the recipe).  This will obviously cut down our costs, and will also solve the problem of having to run out of town every week or two.  And I just might not go broke.  I found that our normally very expensive local store has a bulk bucket of long grain brown rice - 43 pounds for $29 - which is surprisingly one of the best prices I've found.  The next thing I want to get is a grain mill so I can make his flour too.  Mixes are $6-$7 for very little flour - or for one cake mix.  If I ground my own rice flour and oat flour, I could save a ton of money.  I could even make him pasta too.  That would pay for the price of the very expensive grain mill pretty quickly.  I keep hoping he'll outgrow the wheat allergy, but so far, no luck.