Soya Milk and Tofu

Two recipes in one. Make your own Soya Milk and, if you want, turn it into Tofu.

Ingredients:

Soya Milk:

• ½ pint dried Soya Beans
• 1 Gallon Water

Tofu:

• 1 Gallon Soya Milk (as made above)
• 2 teaspoons Epsom Salts

Method:

Soya Milk:

Soak the beans in water overnight.

With an excess of water, liquidise the beans to form a light slurry. Make up to 1 gallon.

Quickly bring to the boil and boil for only 20 minutes (if you boil longer, it will curdle and this is not the correct time to start the cheese process).

Cool quickly and filter the milk through muslin or cheese cloth.

Tofu:

Take one gallon of Soya milk and add the Epsom Salts. Stir and it will curdle. Leave for around 30 minutes (adjust the time and the amount of salts according to experience with any particular source of Soya beans).

Strain through a cheese cloth. The liquid (equivalent to whey in the calf vomit process) is an extremely powerful detergent and can be used for cleaning purposes (including washing the dishes). Slowly squeeze the liquid out of the curds and gradually compress them - this can be done by butting weights on the cheese cloth bag (as it has become) or by putting it in a press. Stop squeezing when the curds are firm.

Variations:

Tofu has almost no flavour of its own (your palette needs to have been meat free for a number of years before you can appreciate the subtleties of tofu) so it will quite easily take on other flavours - add them before pressing.

1. Add various herbs.
2. Add garlic and /or onion.
3. Try smoking it (putting it in wood smoke - not wrapping it in paper and trying to set fire to it)

Storage:

Store in a refrigerator under water that is changed daily. Will keep various times according to how well it is prepared but usually around one week maximum.

Serving suggestions:

To cook with it, chop it up into half inch cubes and deep fry it (in hot oil but with the heat turned off so that it doesn't stick to the bottom) until browned, drain it and then mix it in with any sauce you like. It can alter the emphasis on any meal, curries, even a pasta sauce.

Otherwise, it can be mashed up or chopped up and put in with salads or marinated with salad dressing first.

Note 1:

Making your own Soya Milk involves boiling around a gallon of water and, as a result, is quite hazardous. Boiling such a large quantity on a domestic cooker is not particularly efficient (or green)and is also time consuming. Making Tofu is also time consuming, involving a pressing process and after you have taken the trouble to make your gallon of soya milk, you may find it difficult to come to terms with the fact that you are going to curdle it.

My advice is, unless you really want to make these (it is always good to have a go at least once and then, if you really need to, you are not forced to experiment), or have no alternative, buy them in the shops (unless they are ripping you off of course). Boiling a gallon of milk and then cooling it down quickly (so as to avoid curdling) is done far better with the heat efficient large vessels and counter-current heat exchangers that you find in the commercial process.

Note 2:

It is interesting to not that the Cow's Milk industry always goes on about the Calcium in their products (milk, yogourt, cheese and so on) as though humans are supposed to be able to benefit from it. So where do Vegans get their Calcium from? . . . Probably the same place as 95% of the rest of the population (and possibly the other 5% as well).

It is an interesting fact that . . .

Only 1 person in 20 over the age of six months is able to absorb the Calcium from milk or other milk products.

If as much attention was payed to this fact and the diseases related to milk consumption (heart disease, Rheumatism and so on) as the 'beneficial' qualities of milk (should that be a plural), people's buying habits would be different. (Ever thought about why people in the milk industry say that 'a cow gives x gallons of milk in a year' and not 'we take x gallons of year from the cow' - maybe it is important to imply concent rather than theft????)

Note 3:

It is intersting to compare the amounts of nutritional components in various milks. Here is a table comparing Soya Milk with Full Cow's Milk and Semi Skimmed (interesting that they have to skim off half of the fat of Cow's Milk to get the fat level down to that of Soya Milk - such steps indicate that the product is not too good for you in the first place).

Table 1. Comparison of typical commercial Soya Milk to Cow products.

Per 100g	Cow's Milk		Soya Milk
	Full	Semi- Skimmed
Energy	284kJ (49 kCalories)	206kJ (49 kCalories)	159kJ (38 kCalories)
Protein	3.2g	3.4g	3.3g
Carbohydrate (of which Sugars)	4.7g (4.7g)	5.0g (5.0g)	1.9g (0.1g)
Fat (of which Saturates)	4.0g (2.5g)	1.7g (1.0g)	1.9g (0.3g)

When taking into account the hormone and antibiotic content of Cow's Milk together with the diseases associated with its consumption, one has to ask the question are they trying to con us? When you include the fact that nobody knows how BSE is transmitted and one unfortunate individual who has not eaten meat since before BSE manifested itself (presumably her only Cow input was from milk products), one has to ask the question is it safe?