Milky Plant

Verdict

The price is a little high, but overall the Milky Plant justifies it. Producing perfect plant milk from dry ingredients in three minutes, the Milky Plant is a great addition to homes that want to move away from cow’s milk and hard-to-recycle packaging. Milk quality is excellent across the range, although it would be nice if more than 500ml could be made and if it were easier to use your own bottles. Those minor complaints aside, the Milky Plant works brilliantly and will pay for itself from the savings over supermarket plant milk.

Introduction

Built with complete ease in mind the Milky Plant is far more expensive than its rivals, but it’s easier to use, doesn’t require soaking ingredients, and is really easy to clean up.

Making plant milk isn’t hard, but it is fiddly with a traditional blender, which is why there’s a lot of attraction in a machine that will do the fiddly bits for you and make cleaning up at the end easier.

If you’re serious about plant milk and want the best experience, then it’s currently the best plant milk maker. 

Design and features

• Automated milk making
• Makes 500ml of milk
• Dedicated cleaning cycle

Plant milk is easy to make, as it’s just water and ingredients blended together and passed through a fine filter. In fact, you can make plant milk in any blender, provided you’ve got a fine filter to pour the mixture through at the end. Filtering is the part of the process that causes the most hassle.

However, there’s also a bit of finesse required when blending: choosing the right amount of time to blend for, with pauses at the right times, and getting the right mix of ingredients to water.

The Milky Plant makes all these steps easy with a device that contains a water tank, blender and filter.

The nearest rival to this is the Salter Plant Milk Maker, but the design of the two is very different. The Salter Plant Milk Maker is very much a traditional blender, with a fine mesh filter that clips over the blades. The result is a cheaper machine, but Salter’s product isn’t as easy to use, and far harder to clean up.

With the Milky Plant, the product is much easier to use and has a far better design. There’s a separate water tank at the rear, meaning the machine can automatically dose the correct amount of water for each batch of milk you use.

It’s easy to fill the tank, but I did have to remember to press the button at the back to raise the connector, otherwise the machine can’t pump water.

At the top is the blending chamber, which takes up to 80g of dried ingredients.

It’s easier to use the provided measuring cup than weigh out a single ingredient. There’s a handy ‘max’ line inside, so you can double-check whether you’ve overfilled.

Unlike other milk makers, there’s no need to soak harder ingredients, such as cashew nuts, before blending them to make them softer. You can do this if you prefer the results, although I recommend that you never soak oats, as doing so makes the final drink slimy.

With ingredients in the mixing chamber, the Milky Plant can be turned on and started with the milk button. This runs a preset programme, which includes pumping the right level of milk into the blend chamber, and then running a series of blends. A countdown timer is shown on the integrated display at the front, which can be hard to read in bright light; that’s not an issue, as I normally walk away and get on with other jobs while the Milky Plant does its thing.

The blended mixture runs down a chute into the spinning filter, which removes large particles and outputs pure milk into the glass bottle below.

You have to use the 500ml bottle provided (spares cost £20), as it’s designed to sit just below the spout and fit into the square indentation in the drip tray.

There’s no option to vary the amount of plant milk you make and 500ml is the maximum. Given that is just shy of a pint, I think it’s a sensible amount; with the Salter Plant Milk Maker, I had to make over a litre of milk, and found that this was too much for a week. If you do go through a lot of milk, though, this limit may be a little frustrating.

This bottle has a wide top, which makes it easy to clean. However, as the Milky Plant fills it nearly to the top, the first pour or two are practically impossible to do without spilling milk.

Cleaning up after blending is easy on this machine. The filter comes out, and comes apart, so it can be washed of any residue (or you can keep this for composting or cooking).

There’s a brush attachment that clips into the filter holder, which works with the dedicated cleaning program to flush through clean water and wash the machine out, emptying into a glass you put under the funnel. For a longer clean, you can run the full milk cycle while the machine is empty.

I found that this cleaning process was far easier than with the Salter Plant Milk Maker, which needs hand washing, while being careful not to submerge the electrical parts under water.

Performance

• Excellent milk
• Quick and simple plant milks

In my house, we mostly drink oat milk, as we prefer the taste and oat milk is extremely cheap to make with just water and oats (I don’t like adding a sweetener). I started by making 500ml of this, using a scoop of fresh oats and filtered water from a ZeroWater jug.

I noticed that the final milk was much less frothy than the milk produced by the Salter Plant Milk Maker and contained fewer bits.

This milk will separate when left in the fridge, but it’s nothing that a quick shake won’t fix.

Given that you can buy 1kg of oats for as little as 90p, oat milk is very cheap to make. As each 500ml bottle uses 80g of oats, a 1kg bag will make 12.5 bottles, at a raw ingredient cost of 7.2p per 500ml (or 14.4p per litre). There’s the cost of the water and electricity, but that’s negligible. Overall, oat milk works out significantly cheaper than buying it from the supermarket.

Next, I made a batch of cashew milk. Last time I made this, I had to leave the cashews to soak in water overnight, so that they were soft enough for blending; here, that’s not a requirement, so I just added regular cashews, and let the Milky Plant do its job.

The Milky Plant made short work of the cashews, grinding them into a fine mix and then pouring fresh milk into the bottle. At the end of the process, the filter had a fine cashew paste around it.

I was very happy with the milk: it’s a little thicker and creamier than oat milk and less prone to splitting when left.

Cashew milk is more expensive to make, with 300g of cashews costing around £3. With each milk serving using 80g of cashews, that 300g bag makes 3.75 bottles of milk, at a ingredient cost of 80p. Overall that’s £1.60 per litre, which is still cheaper than buying the same product in the supermarket.

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