Rice, Oat and soya milk and tofu

[nickdutch]

After having developed an obsession with Tofu (a bean curd “fake meat” made with soya beans) I have been struggling to get my head around making tofu in a manner that was easier. Tofu is cheap to make with the bean component for one tofu fry steak if you buy the soy beans from tesco being about 32p per steak (18p if you buy heavily in bulk from some online stores). On top of that you also get the pulp called Okara that can be used in burgers and mixed in with other cooking ingredients and biscuits and the like. The “whey” can be used in soups and all three have nutritional properties and so therefore if you play it right, you get more bang for your buck if you learn to make tofu.
As the process is such a pain, I contemplated buying a “soy milk maker”, but these things retail for a lot of money and the cheaper ones seem to be of oriental origin and don’t even have the control buttons in plain English. So there are all manner of potential issues, such as bad chemical residues from the factory in the devices.
The best one I saw was the soyabella, but that had a real price tag to it. Finally I saw a Morphy Richards Soup maker and noticed immediately that it had the same kind of structure to it as some of the lower cost soy milk makers. I figured that maybe it was just the same kind of device as the soy moil makers, but had been redesigned in terms of names on the control buttons and labelled a “soup maker” for the British market. The Orientals and Americans preferring a more exotic diet maybe?
Finally I saw a Morphy Richards Soup maker on ebay for less then £30, which, considering that the soyabella is pretty close to £110, it seemed like a bargain. Even the cheap Chinese ones were about £50.
I received the soup maker yesterday and have used it so far successfully to make a high concentration rice milk with ¼ cup of rice to make many litres of rice milk (much cheaper than commercial milks) and also successfully creating oat milk too (in both cases using the “smooth soup” setting as that cooks and blends too). Both milks needed heavy diluting to get down to a consistency that is close to a store bought milk, which just shows how much of a rip off rice and oat milk purchased at the health food store or your local supermarket really is.
When I first got it, I made a mistake, I tried to make a raw soya milk first (grinding the soaked soya beans in water in the blender and then putting it through the nut milk making bag). Raw soya milk you never drink as the uncooked beans are not for human consumption. The result was that the ground soya beans burned to the bottom of the container causing it to overheat and the safety shut off shut the thing off. Now have learned to put the beans (after they have been soaking overnight) into the soup maker with the prerequisite quantity of water and let the soup maker cook the beans and then blend them with the water towards the end of the cycle.
I then used two sieves together and at an angle to each other to act as the okara screen to filter out the pulp and poured the cooked soya milk into a saucepan into which I added the coagulant (in this case 3 x spoons of lemon juice mixed with hot water) and let it set for fifteen minutes. I then poured the mixture into the tofu press that was lined with the cheese cloth that came with it. I used my steamer to act as the drip tray to collect the clear yellow whey that came off. I then folded the cheese cloth over the curds, placed the press's plunger on top and placed a weight (a rock) on the top of the plunger. I then left it to set.
This particular batch of tofu came out a little crumbly, but I think that’s because I used a lower weight to press it, so I am freezing it now to improve the texture so I can defrost it for lunch time. The oat milk I am currently drinking is fantastic though.

[pseudonym]

Brilliant tutorial, many thanks for posting.