I’ve recently been thinking about cutting back on the expense of commercial soymilk and becoming less reliant on the supermarket. Making one’s own ‘milk’ is so easy and relatively inexpensive too. In fact there was a great link on Facebook this week about making your own ‘milk’ from all sorts of nuts and seeds, even buckwheat, of which we have an abundant supply, as Tai Chi Man eats it regularly for breakfast. 

I tend not to go overboard on vegan stuff here on the blog, so suffice it to say that plant milks are beneficial for

(a) people: nutritious  and delicious without the suffering, antibiotics and hormones inherent in commercially produced dairy milk

(b) animals: they don’t need to die for us to eat well

(c) the environment: cutting down on intensive cattle raising, with its huge use of water, ginormous piles of cow poop and clouds of methane, has to be a good thing.

I used to have a soymilk maker, where you soaked the beans and then put them in a metal basket inside the jug with water, where the blades blitzed the heck out of them and created the ‘milk.’ When I bought my Vitamix, I gave away the other machine, and finally, after a few years of buying cartons of soymilk, I have started making my own again.

The Vitamix book said to soak the beans overnight, steam them for five minutes, then use a cup and a half of beans to three cups of water. I actually pressure cooked mine for the five minutes, let the pressure come down naturally, and then froze the beans in yogurt pots so that I could just defrost a small amount at a time.

Well, the first batch was really sludgy. Way too many beans.

So I cut it down to one cup. Still too thick. Then three quarters of a cup. Much better. I add a quarter teaspoon of Himalayan salt and a tablespoon of organic sugar, and it tastes great. The true test, to me, was that I can use it in my Yorkshire tea and it is actually fine. I don’t strain it, and I give it a shake before pouring any out, but it can still get a bit thick at the bottom of the jar, so my latest batch is two thirds of a cup of beans to three cups of boiling water, blitzed at high speed for up to a minute with the salt and sugar, and the resultant quantity fits perfectly into a large mason jar.

It’s great that there is way less stuff going into the recycling bin too.