Experiment Number 2
Some background - I have been falling down a YouTube rabbit hole watching people make plant based milks. They essentially all involve taking some kind of bean or seed, blending the snot out of it in some water and then sieving it in a very fine mesh bag. I have tried commercial oat milk in the past and found it to be the most creamy of all the plant based milks (other than coconut milk of course) so I did some extra research on it. It's so easy to make oat milk - one cup of rolled oats, 6 cups of water, half a teaspoon of salt, blend and sieve. I also read lots of stories of the milk getting slimy - this intrigued me. Apparently when you heat oat milk it goes gloopy - so to get nice runny oat milk, some of the 6 cups of water is replaced with ice - then when you blend, you keep it cold and stop it from developing the slime.
Incidentally, I made oat milk in the above post using the ice method on Saturday and today it's all gone - my daughter drank it all!
Getting the right consistency in a hot sauce it one of my continued challenges as I don't like them runny - but hearing oat milk getting slimy when cooked got me thinking that it may be a great base for a sauce. Embrace the slime! So I made another batch and started the process. A bunch of superhots:
I added 1 litre of oat milk and about 4 tablespoons of white miso. Blended it:
I guess the chillies and miso pulled down the pH a little but still far too high. So I put it in a pan and brought it to about 40C. I added lactic acid powder (I chose this because it's the most cheesy of the acids) until I got to a pH of 4.0. About half a teaspoon. I did taste it and it was basically raw chilli so I knew it needed a good cook.
Brought to the boil and left to simmer for a while (while watching my son play video games). I came back and it had thickened up nicely. A taste reminded me of a very spicy and runny queso. It actually was pretty good hot - I think that without so many chillies, this may make for a good vegan queso; something that I will have to try another day. Anyway, I had a little more than a quart jar so I put the remainder in a 8oz squeezy bottle. They'll both go in the fridge once they've cooled and I'll check pH and consistency tomorrow night.
I hope this runny enough to be a sauce - one worry is that it turns into a solid lump. I'll report back tomorrow!