Soy Milk Success

When Jen visited Vietnam last year she brought back an absolute beast of an appliance. The Bluestone BLB-6035 is a cooking blender, that can be used for general blending, making smoothies, but most importantly making soups and bean milks.

Jen likes to make rice milk, and we have tried a few other things like corn milk, and regularly make smoothies with it using banana, watermelon, rock melon etc.

I've tried making soy milk with the cooking blender a couple of times using dried soy beans, and while I was fairly successful, the end product always came out with a pretty strong bean-y flavour that isn't present in store-bought soy milk, and was also fairly yellow. It was okay cold, but was not really suitable for making coffee.

After a bit of research, I discovered that there are two ways to mitigate the flavour. One, add a little salt, and two, thoroughly soak the beans prior to cooking.

I gave it a try this time around, soaking the beans for about 12 hours prior to putting them in the cooker. After a couple of hours the beans had swelled considerably (aside from one recalcitrant that I later discarded), and I noticed that a few husks were popping off the beans as they swelled. I removed the floating husks, changed the water, and repeated the process with a couple of hours wait in between.

After a few repetitions, I decided to manually husk the remaining beans myself. It took me a few goes to get the technique right, but once I figured it out it was pretty quick and easy. After about 15 minutes I had a bunch of husks, and some freshly naked beans ready to make milk. I put the husks in our compost bin and ran the Bluestone through the milk making process, which takes about 30 minutes. My first takeaway at the end was that the milk was not yellow; it was the typical creamy white that you see in store-bought soy milk.

Instead of waiting for the milk to cool down and put it through a cheese cloth, I used my new strainer. It has 3 parts - a 2 litre jug at the bottom, a high-walled fine strainer that sits on top, and a small press that can be used to squeeze the okara after the majority of milk has passed through. The strainer was so much easier to use than the cheese cloth. My only doubt is the resiliency of the strainer, but hopefully I'll get some decent use out of it if I am careful.

The end result was some creamy soy milk, and a thick layer of okara in the strainer. I put the okara in the compost bin this time, but I have seen some interesting alternative uses for it that I'd like to try. Next time, I may try making okara patties.

After adding just a little salt, the soy milk tasted almost exactly like store-bought. I'd call that a success. Although the soaking adds quite a bit of time, and the husking is a little bit of effort, I'd consider it worth it to get a really decent end result.

When making soy milk using the cooking blender, my proportions are half a cup of dried soy beans, and one litre of water.