I hadn’t thought about peanut milk before now. I imagine few people have – it doesn’t exist in the UK – but then the US company Elmhurst Dairy, which recently swapped cows for nuts, started making it, and suddenly peanut milk became a bit like that scene in Call Me By Your Name involving Timothée Chalamet and a peach. One of those things you haven’t much thought about until you do, and then can’t undo that thought until you’ve had a go. So, I did – with peanuts, not peaches, that is.
Peanut milk is the latest addition to the canon of nut milks that includes coconut, cashew, hazelnut and almond. I made my own over Easter weekend, when the shops were shut. Luckily, the pub up the road was open so, after the lamb, I headed to the White Horse, ordered half a cider and four bags of salted peanuts, gave a false story about why I needed so many and went home.
Following the simplest recipe I could find, I rinsed the salt off 200g of nuts, and put them in water to soak overnight. The next morning, the nuts visibly swollen, I blended them with half a litre of clean water and added vanilla essence and two prunes. (The recipe called for dates but this time the White Swan couldn’t deliver.) I blended it for about a minute, poured the liquid through an Eve Lom muslin cloth and ta-dah! Peanut milk.
I can’t emphasise enough how weird room-temperature peanut milk tastes. Chilled, however, it tasted nicer than any nut milk I’ve bought: a thick water with a fleshed-out peanut flavour.
The global market for dairy alternative drinks is expected to surpass £11.4bn this year. Almond milk has long been king of the game but almonds love water, which is far from ideal for the environment. (There’s a whole subplot in Netflix’s The Good Place in which a character thinks he’s been sent to hell for using almond milk, despite knowing this.) So maybe this is peanuts’ big chance. My version had almost as much protein as dairy milk – more than is found in almond alternatives – so it could prove popular with gym types, too.
One problem with non-dairy milks is semantics. We have to call it something, but can we call it milk? Palm Things, which is about to launch drinks made from cashew and coconut, has opted for the increasingly popular moniker “Mylk”. In homage, possibly, to the cows they used to milk before they switched to nuts, Elmhurst Dairy call its drink “Milked Peanuts”.
Do nut milks have a responsibility to mimic their dairy equivalents? Unless you have to eschew milk for dietary reasons, should ditching dairy mean accepting that there are some things you can no longer enjoy in the same way? As with most things in life, I’m unsure – but what I do know is that peanut milk is good served cold, in a smoothie, and gross with cereal. And, Oscar-wise, Chalamet was robbed.
