Anarchocyclist

Recently i had some fun making my own soy milk, so i thought i’d share some thoughts on the process. It’s actually quite simple to do, and can be done with many other substances besides soy beans. Next i want to try it with nuts and rice, and maybe make horchata from the rice milk.

So here’s the deal: basically you just boil some beans. First, you need some fresh or rehydrated soy beans. If you get dried soybeans, they need to be soaked for several hours (6?) beforehand, so that they’re soft. Dried soybeans tend to have a rather strange shape…they’re more like little spheres instead of the standard bean shape. Once you soak them, though, they return to bean shape somehow. Once you have hydrated soy beans, grind em up with several cups of water. I use an electric food processor for this, but i’d like to find a manual way to do it. lemme know if you have ideas.

It’s ok to have plenty of water. The recipes i looked at said about 10 to 1 water to beans. Once they’re ground, you have a bunch of white opaque water with bean sludge in it. If you do things the chinese way, you strain out the sludge first. The japanese way is to cook all of this and strain later (iirc), but if you do this then you need some kind of anti-foaming agent in there because it froths up a lot. This is why i prefer to strain the bean sludge out first. By the way, this bean sludge is called Okara in japanese, and the chinese call it 雪花菜 (xue3 hua1 cai4) or 豆腐渣 (dou4 fu3 zha1 = soy bean dregs ). You can use it for a variety of other things, and it’s high in protein and calcium. A suggestion i’m going to try soon is mixing it into pancakes for extra protein and texture.

So you’ve separated out the 豆腐渣 and you’ve got a pot of white liquid. This is almost soy milk, but not quite. It really needs to be cooked for a while, for two reasons. One is that it contains an enzyme that inhibits digestion of protein, and the other is that it has a really beany flavour. You simply bring it to a boil and simmer it for about 20 minutes and it will destroy the unwanted enzyme and make the flavour milder. Voila, you now have hot soy milk. Easy, eh? Soak beans, grind em, filter it, boil it.

Next is tofu. I haven’t actually made this yet, for lack of a coagulating agent, but here’s how it’s supposed to work. You take your freshly cooked soy milk, and you mix in something like Nigari (magnesium chloride), Epsom salts (magnesium sulfate) or Gypsum (calcium sulphate). You can also use an acid, such as lemon juice, but you risk making it lemon-flavoured tofu. The idea is just like making cheese; you curdle the soy milk, then scoop off the clumps and press them with a cheesecloth.

After reading about this, i wondered where one could get Gypsum or Epsom salts without the standard solution of “buy them at the store”. It turns out that it doesn’t sound too hard to extract Nigari from sea water, which would be pretty convenient in Vancouver. If you boil down some sea water, you can get crystals of sodium chloride, magnesium chloride, and a bit of magnesium sulfate. Next you want to separate out the sodium chloride (table salt), which is useful on its own. You do this by putting the crystals in a cloth bag, and hanging them above a pot in a damp place, or perhaps by boiling some water in said pot so that the steam rises up to the bag. Magnesium chloride is super soluble, and will latch onto the water before the sodium chloride. This liquid magnesium chloride solution will then drip through the bag down into the pot. Then you can just boil it down again and you have your Nigari crystals.

Somehow, as i was reading about Nigari and tofu, i got onto the topic of MSG. I discovered that, along with the standard “sweet, sour, salty, bitter” flavours, there’s another basic flavour called umami, aka “savoury”. This occurs because a section of our tongue is focused on detecting glutamates. This is one of the reasons that tomato is such a flavour enhancer…it has lots of free glutamates. From what i read on wikipedia, it seems that there’s really not that much wrong with MSG, but there’s a lot of hype about the reactions that some unknown percentage of people can experience from having too much of it. Here’s an interesting article on it: Could MSG make a comeback?. Anyway, MSG can be condensed out of Kombu seaweed broth, so it doesn’t seem like the magical chemical concoction that i previously thought it was. Maybe the scientificky name helped with that impression. I’m curious to try cooking with it now

That’s about it for my thoughts on food today. Next on my list is to try to make a beverage from Mung beans (绿豆), and maybe out of walnuts. I’ll try making some tofu when i get back to Vancouver, which will actually be quite soon.

Ride hard, ride free

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 18th, 2007 at 03:00 am and is filed under Front Page, food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.