Soy Simplified

Soy stuff can be sticky.

First there’s the soyapower machine.  It came with a package of magic cleaning powder that instructs one to mix a container of the stuff to reuse–who has room on a counter?  The idea is appealing in that it sounds like a way to ease cleanup unless one is opposed to leaving soaking parts laying about the kitchen.  So, instead, we have stuck with vigilant immediate cleanup and as we do it the process seems to become less of a chore. 

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This bit of experimentation was such a success I’ve come to post the recipe immediately!

Alice’s Rich Okara Peanut Butter Brownie

Preheat oven to 350.

Mix:

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I mentioned before the fact that okara is, the truth of making soy-milk, the ever-present reality…the more soymilk you make the more okara you have; the okara becomes a task requiring prompt attention.  Granola has been a repeating theme, I will reiterate, it’s the single-most, easiest, most enthusiastically received use that I’ve come up with so far.  You don’t even have to press the okara, just use it straight out of the soy-milk machine.

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One okara use that gets mentioned alot is the patty or “burger” and so last night we gave it a try.  Grated parsnips, carrots, chopped onion, chopped leek and a little garlic were sauteed and mixed with okara and a little flour.  This was made into patties and breaded, then fried but only a few were cooked before I decided to add an egg to the mixture.  The mixture plus egg held together well, these could be served without falling apart in transfer to plate.

What can I say?  The flavor was great.  The texture?  Really not bad but not what I wanted in a patty.  More vegetables and some cooked brown rice would have fleshed them out nicely, maybe a little nut meal…

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Finally able to come back and offer a recipe, this is simple, easily modified and doesn’t seem to last long enough at our house to have for breakfast the next day. 

Preheat oven to 325.  Combine:

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The next batch of soy milk was made with some rice added to alter the flavor of the milk. After making two batches the okara was pressed. We have a little plastic tofu press, and use it for pressing the okara too. I split the block of okara with my son and we each set out to make something. He made crackers from whole wheat, okara, a little white flour, olive oil, and water. They were baked on a buttered pan and were sprinkled with sea salt. They were pretty tasty, close to a wheat thin (touch more salt, touch of sugar and they would probably be a very close match). I’ll get some real recipes with measurements in here, eventually, but the dishes talked about here were created sans accurate measurement and so will be discussed without specific measurement.

I made granola. Honey, peanut butter, okara and oil were mixed and then oats stirred in. This was spread on a pan and baked at 325, turned every 10 minutes for about 50 minutes until it was browned nicely. It crunches up as it cools so you can’t taste for crunch while it’s hot, one must go by color and the end baking time is a bit critical because it will burn rapidly if it cooks too long. The granola was very crunchy, but light at the same time.

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No recipes yet, eventually there really will be some though. Right now I’m still catching up the log with what we did before getting this blog set up. But we did make some brownies using the okara from one run of the maker. We used it straight up from production in place of flour and it worked well. The brownies were a little sticky, the recipe needed a slight bit of work. I also decided that I needed to press the okara before proceeding to get out a little more milk and have a dryer product to work with.

It was a good idea, honestly! What better way to use okara than to lean on the popular uses I’d read about? The problem came in when I tried to apply what I’d read in an ill-conceived fashion. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t horrible it just ranked among those meals people refer to as weird hippie food if ya know what I mean. And the thing is, the meal wasn’t nutritionally a powerhouse, we had multiple fried dishes and it was really supposed to appeal to the junk food lover. Ah well.

The menu as planned consisted of the following: junk food tofu, croquettes, a stir fry with okara, shrimp egg foo yung (for familiarity and to appease those who might ask, “where’s the meat?”) and rice.

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I purchased a SoyaPower soymilk maker and set about making some soy milk which the family pretty much guzzled. Two recipes and two more then we had a jug in the fridge and a heap of okara in the fridge too. The next day I made 4 more batches of milk to make into tofu so you can imagine, the okara was beginning to pile up.

Now I have to talk a sec about my family, I have one milk avoider (excited about the machine and its potential), one who tasted the soymilk and decided it was great, another who drank some didn’t hate it or love it, one who looked at it with concern and tried it determined to dislike it and…the husband who has, to date, disliked all things soy except maybe the rare tofu fried up and sizzled with soy sauce and nutritional yeast. Oh and me, I like soy foods and think adding a little soy to our diet is a good way to improve it not to mention the cost effectiveness of the addition.

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