A great bonus from making your own soy milk is the okara (aka: soy bean pulp) left after draining. It’s a resource most factories will either discard or feed to farm animals but, this protein packed ingredient can be added to baked goods, use to make vegetarian/vegan sausages (yup… that’s going to be for a future recipe) or dried up and reduced in powder to add to almost everything. It is versatile, delicious and using the okara is leaving you with no kitchen waste. Something to think about…
As you will see, the process for making soy milk is very simple. If you wanted to make soy cream, bring back the drained milk on the stove top and let it simmer down to half of it’s original quantity. As the water will evaporate, the mixture will thicken and become a nice and silky cream. A thickening agent can be used to make the process faster, I would recommend tapioca starch for it’s light taste.
The process is always the same, the ingredients may vary. This is my way… feel free to use it, tweak it and find the perfect balance of soy beans versus water that works best for you.
- 2 cups of dried soy beans + water to soak the beans
- 8 cups of water
- Sweetener of your choice (optional as plain soy milk is sweet on it's own)
- - Soak your beans overnight. Discard the water. It makes about 5⅓ cups of rehydrated beans total.
- - For every two cups of soaked beans, I put three cups of water. The last 1⅓ cup will get two cups of water, making 8 cups total. Using your blender, blend the water and beans together. The colour should be a nice white.
- - Bring everything to a TALL pot and bring to a boil while stirring. Once it is boiling, start a 20-25 minutes timer and stir once in a while. The reason for a tall pot is that, during the boiling process, the foam will rise A LOT so make sure it's tall enough because it will go overboard very easily.
- - Using either a cheese cloth or a nut milk bag, drain the mixture by squeezing. The solids in the bag/cheese cloth is the okara while liquid is your soy milk.
- - For a thicker and/or sweetened milk: return the liquid to the stove top and add a thickening agent like tapioca starch and/or a sweetener but I personally like it as is.
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