How to Make Soy Milk at Home

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Soy milk is a combination of water, protein, and oil. It’s made by letting dry soybeans soak in water for a period of time and then grinding/blending them into a fine mixture. Soy milk actually contains roughly the same amount of protein as the milk from a cow does (about 3.5%). Additionally, you can coagulate the protein from soy milk and use it to

make tofu in a process similar to how cow’s milk is used to produce cheese. Making soy milk at home is actually very simple and requires very few ingredients and minimal equipment, and can be done in about 10 minutes or so if you’ve already soaked the soy beans the night before. Let’s get started.

First, a few tips

  • It might seem obvious, but if I don’t say this there will be some people who won’t do it: clean the soy beans. Clean them before soaking them overnight, they don’t arrive as clean as you’d want them to be and any dirt or chemicals on them will end up in your soy milk.
  • You don’t have to, but removing the hulls by kneading the beans and then rinsing the hulls away with some water makes the extraction process more efficient. Something else you can do is to just crack the soy bean hulls before soaking them; the soaking will require less time, only about 6-8 hours, and once they’re done the hulls are very easy to wash away.
  • Once you’ve filtered the soy milk out of the mixture, the leftover stuff on the filter or cheesecloth or whatever you used is called okara, which you can either use as an ingredient for bread or as cattle feed.
  • Keep in mind that you’re making unsweetened soy milk and if you want it sweetened you’ll need to do that yourself with sugar or simple syrup.
  • If you’re going to be doing this a lot then you might want to think about getting your own soy milk machine to make the process a lot easier, I like the Joyoung automatic soy milk maker that you can get there from Amazon.

How to do it

Additional Resources and Further Reading

If you haven’t got it already, I highly recommend The Whole Soy Cookbook by Patricia Greenberg, excellent book.

Here’s some additional information on making soy milk, including various recipes and pointers.

For more general information on soy, including tons of recipes and health information, check out The Soy Connection.