This Easy Cheat Horchata is light and refreshing, subtly spiced and inconspicuously healthy!
Horchata is the perfect drink to accompany any Mexican meal, from nachos and quesadillas to tacos and burritos. It's also delicious on its own as a refreshing cold drink on a summer's day, and it's especially handy to have a jug of it around when catering for a thirsty crowd!
As it's naturally vegan and gluten-free, it conveniently covers a wide range of dietary requirements too.
The Mexican drink horchata is traditionally made by blending up soaked rice and almonds. It's flavoured with cinnamon and sugar is usually added, sometimes in the form of condensed milk.
As much as I love this drink, I'm definitely not a fan of this time-consuming process of soaking the rice and almonds and then blending them, especially as it also requires a lot of washing up.
I prefer to keep things simple, so decided to ditch all the soaking and blending and just mix together some store-bought rice milk and almond milk instead.
As rice milk is already pretty sweet, I prefer to buy an unsweetened almond milk. And although Horchata usually contains added sugar, I really don't think it needs it. And so, this super easy, 3-ingredient (cheat) version of mine was created!
The recipe below is for one, but you can double as you please.
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Helpful tools to make this Easy Cheat Horchata:
measuring jug
Easy Cheat Horchata (Vegan + GF)
Ingredients
- 120 ml (½ cup) rice milk
- 120 ml (½ cup) unsweetened almond milk
- Pinch ground cinnamon, to taste
Instructions
- Mix together all ingredients
- Best served cold with plenty of ice
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Anonymous
Love how easy this is - will be making this for Cinco de Mayo!
Rhian Williams
Thank you!
Carol B Ferrer
I added Matcha to mine via Matcha Almond milk was really really good.
Rhian Williams
Thank you so much, so happy to hear that!
Al
In Spain, orchata is made by soaking and processing Tiger nuts ; they add sugar to it, but I think that's awful... it already tastes sweet without it.
I make mine plain, or with cinnamon and fresh ginger ; then I use the solid residue to make a cake or cookies...
Tiger nuts are super healthy, with resistant starch present in the raw form!
Rhian Williams
Thank you so much for sharing, I will definitely try this out!
Chantelle Bell
I make a similar version but I use monin cinnamon syrup so it adds an extended cinnamon taste and sweetness
Rhian Williams
Thank you for sharing sounds delicious!