How To Make Soy Milk

I got a homemade soy milk recipe but this is more on the commercial side because the procedure also have a way of storing the milk for longer periods for you to sell it without affecting the quality. And with the addition of carrageenan to preserve the products’ quality (probably to emulsify the soy from water and to increase viscosity). I made a little research on carragenan. I thought is a chemical preservative but it was not. It came from a sea weed. It is a seaweed extract common in the Atlantic Ocean near Britain, Continental Europe and North America. You can buy the carragenan in chemical supplies store.

Raw Materials You Will Need:

1 kilogram dried soybeans
10 L water
12 % white sugar (600 grams)
0.02% carrageenan (20~22ml)

Tools, equipment and utensils needed:

  • Blender
  • Stove, pot, weighing scale
  • Basting spoon
  • Knife
  • 1-yard cheesecloth
  • Plastic basin
  • Pressure cooker/canner
  • Strainer

How to prepare soy milk

Select good soybeans. Good soybeans are spotless, smooth, and free from infestation. Wash them, then soak them overnight or for at least 6 hours. After soaking the soybeans, wash and clean them; by then they would have expanded to three times their original size. Remove the beans from the water and peel the hulls.

Blanch the soybeans for 3 minutes, throw the away the water, then blanch the beans a second time. Blanching consists of scalding an item for a short time in water, then draining the water.

Afterwards,  grind the soybeans and extract the milk. The amount of water would be 10 times the weight of the soybeans. Thus, for a kilo of soybeans, you need to mix in 10 L of water. This 1: 10 proportion hastens the extraction of milk.

Boil the milk until the temperature reaches 80 degrees Celcius. This would kill microorganisms that would make the milk spoil too quickly . Add 600 g sugar and a teaspoon of carrageenan. The sugar should only comprise 12 percent of the soy mixture, the carrageenan, on the other hand, should comprise only 0.02 percent ( about 20 ~ 22ml). Boil the soymilk at 80 degrees Celcius for another 5 minutes.

Afterwards, pour the milk into the sterilized bottles. Seal the bottles. Pasteurize the milk by putting the sealed bottled in a pressure cooker, and process the batch at 15 pounds per square inch pressure (psi) for 30 minutes. Without pasteurization and thermal processing, soymilk will only last for a week.