The Lustful Vegan

Lately I’ve become a fiend for hot chocolate. More on that later. In the meantime, though, I decided it was time to make up some chocolate ‘mylk’ to give me a slightly healthier version of the drink. As far as I can tell, “mylk” is a term coined by raw foodies, referring specifically to milks created from nuts or seeds. I like it — both the term and the drink.

My favourite mylk comes from an Ani Phyo recipe (from the book Ani’s raw food kitchen), and contains almonds, dates, cocoa powder, vanilla extract, and sometimes a titch of caramel extract. Yum! I find almost all store-bought chocolate milk (whether soy, rice, or almond-based) far too sweet for me, but with this mylk it’s always exactly right, because it’s so easy to tweak the recipe to my tastes. Less sweet, more chocolate! And while it does have yummy sweetness, the sugar all comes from whole dates and thus I don’t feel guilty. (Not that I’d feel guilty anyway.)

Mylk does have a bit of graininess when you drink it — this comes from the ground up almonds. You could probably filter it through cheesecloth or a coffee filter if that bothered you, though you’d lose some of the almond goodness. I notice the graininess less after it’s chilled in the fridge for a day or two though.

If you wanted to try some of your own, this recipe is fairly simple. You could use all water instead of the coconut milk, replace the vanilla bean with extract (1T = 1 bean), and even use almonds. These recipes are great to experiment with.

Going beyond the raw, I’ve used various mylks in baking and they work just fine. The most interesting was Ani’s pumpkin mylk, made from fresh pumpkin seeds. I drank half and used the rest in cupcakes. Tasty! And also handy, since mylk is easy to whip up from scratch when you run out of soy/rice/almond milk during a late-night baking spree. Not that that happened to me…noooooo…