Horchata

The recipe is copied from this reddit comment.

The recipe

Ingredients

• 1 cup of white rice
• 1-2 sticks of cinnamon
• 1 can of sweetened condensed milk
• 1 can of evaporated milk
• 1-2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1/2 - 1 cup of white sugar - to taste
• water - to taste and for soaking the rice

Method

1. Soak all the rice and cinnamon sticks in warm/hot water, add enough to cover the rice and cinnamon. This will soften the rice to be more easily blended, we usually soak from 30-minutes to even a couple of hours depending on when we want to serve the drink. You could probably skip this step but this is just what we've always done.
2. Add the rice and cinnamon along with the water it was soaked in into a blender with the vanilla, condensed milk, and evaporated milk. You can also go ahead and blend in the sugar at this point but you can also add in more sugar at the end to taste.
3. Blend all those ingredients together for about 2 minutes or so
4. Pour the blended mixture into a pitcher with a meshed strainer, this will get rid of the bigger pieces of rice and cinnamon.
5. The blended mixture is the horchata concentrate, dilute it with water and sugar to taste. If you add too much water just go ahead and add more sugar.

Vegan horchata

Ingredients

• 1 cup of uncooked long-grain rice (~220g)
• 1 stick of cassia cinnamon (12g)
• ~8 cups water
• 1 can coconut milk
• 250g caster sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Method

1. Wash the rice
2. Add the rice, cinnamon stick and 4 cups of water to a container
3. Leave the container in the fridge overnight
4. Blend the mixture
5. Add the coconut milk, sugar and vanilla extract to the mixture
6. Blend some more
7. Use a sieve to filter the large pieces out of the mixture
8. Store in the fridge
9. To serve, dilute with water to taste (Approximately 1 part horchata mixture to 1 part water)

Creating the recipe

I made the non-vegan version first and then looked to see how it could be tweaked for my dairy-free friends. I replaced the milks with a can of coconut milk and sugar to get a similar fat and sugar content.

Calculating the total content in the milks of the original recipe gives you 68.66g of fat and 270.42g of sugar. The coconut milk has 59.2g of fat and 6.4g of sugar. 250g of sugar seemed about right to get close enough.