Becoming vegan - tofu

Last week I made tofu - just because. I’d always looked at tofu and thought it seems really processed. I didn’t think it was possible to make home made tofu. I saw a foodie TV show recently where the host visited a farm, they harvested soy beans and made tofu with the soy beans. The process was very similar to cheese making. In fact, tofu is basically a soft cheese made from soy beans.

Soy beans

Procedure

In summary, I -

• soaked the soy beans overnight (I used 6 cups of soy beans).
• drained the water, then blended the soaked beans with equal parts soy beans and water until creamy.
• passed the blended soy mixture through a strainer - the resulting liquid was soy milk!
• heated the soy milk to about 85 degrees celsius.
• added about one quarter of a cup of lemon juice* per litre as a coagulant to split the milk to create curds and whey.
• spooned the curds out of the pan into a strainer to allow excess whey to drain through.
• placed the curds into a mold. I used a standard takeaway container and poked holes through it and let it sit for a day.
• put the tofu in the fridge for a couple of hours to chill to help with its form and structure.

*Generally ingredients such as gypsum are recommended as coagulants. Traditionally others such as nagiri are used in the tofu-making process but I found recipes suggesting lemon juice as a substitute if you don't have any of these exotic ingredients in the kitchen. The curds and whey separated without any problems using lemon juice.

By-products

After I blended the soybeans, there was quite a bit that would not pass through the strainer, so this was basically what I would call ‘pulp’. I tried drying this out in the oven for a couple of hours to make flour but it still maintained its moisture. However, I thought about things you generally use flour for - often it’s with eggs. The flour is the thickening agent and eggs are the binding agents. Fritters are a good example of this. So we had zucchini fritters for breakfast on Sunday morning - and they turned out pretty good!

Pulp (flour)

Fritters #notvegan

I kept the whey in a large jar and I’ve just been using it to have on cereal. It’s a bit sour, so not the best but I it’s fine with cereal. I have seeds and dried fruit on my cereal to jazz it up a bit so a bit of sourness is tolerable. I wouldn’t consider using it for tea though!

Whey

Final product

I made a salad with tofu, pickeled and roasted carrots, fresh greens from the garden and some roasted nuts and seeds. I coated the tofu with turmeric to make it fancy and - as a bonus - this gave it a bit of a crust after frying. Yum!

Tofu

Tofu salad

Now what?

Earlier this year I wrote a post about some experiments from the kitchen with plant-based cheese. The idea was to try and successfully make cheese from oats (this failed), then make oat milk, then try to grow oats (when we move to a place with a bit more land) - essentially reverse-engineering the process on a small scale. I would definitely love to grow some soy beans but I’m not sure yet how much land I would need to grow enough soy beans (6 cups) to make a slab of tofu this size once or twice a fortnight.