Ellen vs. Homemade Soy Milk - part 1

Jon and I have been eating more vegan than not lately which means more soy milk and tofu. After a conversation with some friends of mine and the discovery of this site, I decided that I wanted to try to make my own soy milk and tofu.

This is a many day process so I'm going to blog about it as I go, which means you will get my totally uncensored opinion of how hard or easy it is. Today involved the purchase of the soy beans and the soaking.

Buying organic soy beans: Easy
I found organic soy beans at the Fort Collins Food Co-op. If you live in a town with a food co-op, you should definitely check it out. We buy all of our bulk items at the coop and recently had to shop at a Whole Foods when we were out of town and wow is the Whole Foods bulk section ridiculously small (Take that, Whole Foods! Your bulk food section is miniscule!) Anyway, here are the soy beans in all their organic and inexpensive glory:

You will notice in the instructions that the recipe calls for one pound (or 500g) of soybeans. It is kind of unclear how much soy milk I will end up with but $1.59 for each batch is pretty great.

Measuring out the beans, cleaning and soaking them: Easy

I used my kitchen scale to measure out the beans and kind of half-ass rinsed them since they looked pretty clean and there were definitely not any stones.

Here are the beans before rinsing and soaking:

And here they are in their water:

So far, so good. Tomorrow the real fun begins.