The great tofu making adventure of 2011 was successful, if messy, and it seemed like high time to try again.
The steps were pretty much the same in this episode:
- Buy soy beans from the grocery store (dried)
- Soak overnight. 300g soy beans in 1 litre of water
- Drain the beans and purée in the blender
- Boil the purée with more water. Cook until there is no more “green”/raw smell, about 10 minutes
- Put the purée in muslin cloth and squeeze out the liquid into a bowl in order to the separate the “extra” material (okara*)
- Heat the liquid (now soy milk) to 70 degrees C in microwave
- Add nigari* and mix quickly
- Wait until the tofu sets
- Eat! [and clean up]
However, we had a lot of trouble at the muslin cloth step. The soy bean mixture was pretty mashy and although we squeezed with all our might and used a variety of implements, we couldn’t get much liquid out. So after about 2 hours of work, we had only 4 small ramekins of soy milk. We had tons of okara, though, so that’s a success.
The second problem was that the tofu didn’t set. It just stayed at soy milk consistency. I don’t know if was a problem with the nigari or the temperature or what. Sad panda. So we ended up with a wee bit of soy milk and lots of okara. And lots of mess. Ah well, it was a diversion.
*See previous post

Ready to squeeze

Okara

A wee bit of soy milk was produced