My Journal

Soybean milk is very refreshing especially in a cold morning or winter day. Soybean milk is very popular in beijing, any expat in China would soon encounter either on a store by the street or in a luxury hotel cafetaria. Fresh soybean milk has a distinct smell and taste that are just so silky and delicious.

TIP: To prevent sticking and burning, when boiling soymilk, pour soymilk into boiling water. Don't start with an empty cold pot.

TIPS on How to make homemade soybean milk

Easiest way is to buy a machine. Very easy, all one needs is to push a button. But the quantity is limited especially if your family really drinks a lot of soybean milk like we do. It can't handle thick soybean milk too to make tofu. You could buy a tofu maker however...

To use Stove:

There are many ways to make soybean milk. The principle is the same: cook, stir, ground the bean. !The hard part of making soybean milk: To prevent it from sticking to the pot and got burnt and to prevent the liquid from spilling from the pot. Burnt soybean milk tastes really bad and very hard to clean afterwards.

After making some trials and errors, I found my favorite two methods:  

FIRST METHOD 

Ingredients:

1/2 cup soybean (黄豆)

5 cups water. Some use the proportion of bean vs water to be 1:5. I don't like it to be too thick so I use 1:10. Some even use 1:12.

Method:

. Soak bean overnight. (General rule of thumb: 10 hours or less for summer more for winter, but not more than 24 hrs). Put the bean in a bowl with lots of water since the bean would expand later. Roughly, the water surface should be 3 cm or 1.5 inches above the bean.

. Wait until the following day or at least 6 hours later. (8-12 hrs should be roughly the ideal time depending on the weather, temperature...)

. Throw away the water used to soak the bean and change it with fresh water. In a pot put the bean and 4 cups of water. Boil for 10 minutes, scooped the white stuffs, stir occasionally.

. Take the bean ONLY (leave the water in the pot). Grind with the remaining 1 cup of water for, at least, 5 minutes until becoming silky.

TIP: don't grind less than 5 minutes since the granules are still too big and the soymilk won't be tasty.

. Reboil the water in the pot and pour the ground beans mixture to the pot.* Use medium heat, stir occasionaly and scoop the white stuffs on the surface. Boil for a few minutes 1-3minutes. You coul cover the pot but open occasionally to stir and throw away the white stuffs to prevent spilling.

* TIP: boiled water will prevent soybean milk to stick at the bottom of the pot. It's much easier to handle versus boiling cold soymilk in a cold pot.

. Ready to drink. Unless.... you really want a super clear soybean milk without any grain at all like what's sold in store. If so see below:

Sieveing Soybean Milk 

To get clear liquid like you buy in store, one needs to sieve the soybean milk. But so sieve only sometimes is not enough, one should use a cloth and squeeze it and so on... After a while it's becoming too cumbersome and annoying.

 --> cumbersome

So this is what I do. After cooking, I let it sit totally undisturbed, let all grains sink to the bottom of  the pot. Later when the milk cools down, I sieve using a sifter then drink it. The more you let it sit, the easier it is to separate the milk and the grains.

SECOND METHOD:

This is another of my favorite methods. See, I don't really like the pulp, to me it destroys the taste of silky soybean. So in this second method, I squeeze the ground soybean milk with cloth first then cook it*. (*To do it after cooking will make the pulp to be too soft that it penetrates trough the cloth)

Ingredients:

1/2 cup soybean (黄豆)

4 cups water* 

* Since in this second method the pulp is not cooked, the taste of the soybean milk is less stronger. So better to use less amount of water.

So what I did was:

. Ground soybean with 1 cup of water

. Boil remaining 3 cups of water

. Squeeze the liquid with cloth, throw away the pulp.

. Pour the squeezed soybean milk in the boiling water and boil, stir constantly for 3-5 minutes. Lower down the heat after boiling.

CON: The taste of the soybean milk using this method is less stronger but the liquid is clearer since we throw away most pulp before cooking. My kids say this soybean milk tastes like tofu and they really don't like it.