Wintermilk: making soymilk and tofu

Well, I suppose we're not totally out of things to blog about, on the homefront...

Since we will be leaving the farm in the spring, and winters are a hardship on animals up here, we won't be keeping any livestock this winter. And since dairy and egg production are on hold through the dark and extremely cold months of January - March, we won't be missing much. Last winter we purchased rice and soy milk, in bulk, to carry us through the goat's milk drought, since the only other option within our range is commercial cow's milk. But we got to thinking about making soy milk and tofu this year instead.

Now, we have each been through the spectrum of diets, from vegan to vegetarian to Weston A. Price traditional-meat-and-dairy based diet. For the most part, veganism and vegetarianism grew naturally out of an urban environment, and we got interested in Weston Price and the well-known cookbook, Nourishing Traditions, as we started raising our own livestock.

We now have a hybridized diet. Since raising meat, eggs and milk is still resource expensive in the North, requiring large amounts of land, and grain/hay supplies to last at least 7 months a year, we do not entirely rely upon meat and dairy to supply our protein. In fact, to raise these products out of season, we need to grow high-protein legume feeds for the animals... legumes we could just as easily grow for ourselves. I enjoy the milk and egg glut that comes with the spring and early summer, but treat these foods as seasonal items. And for meat, we consume 10 lbs a month, for two adults, plus as much gelatin rich broth as I can put away. Legumes make up the rest of our protein requirements.

Along with learning about such nutrient rich foods as a good bone stock, and lacto-fermented vegetables advocated by the Weston Price foundation, we also became weary of soybeans. And in the process, did some in-depth research for myself. From what I have read, on both sides of the issue, and even from the livestock perspective, I understand the dangers of a heavily soy-based diet to be primarily from improper preparation, or from an imbalance of calcium when replacing soy for milk. Soy, along with other legumes and grains, is heavy on the side of phosphorous, and low on the side of calcium, the opposite of milk. So as we phase out dairy products, and begin using more properly prepared soy-based foods, my main concern is fulfilling our calcium requirements. Especially in the winter months when our "green" foods are at the lowest.

So I did a calcium "audit" of our typical winter diet, and found that the base-line is at about half of a recommended daily intake of 1000mg. In further researching calcium rich foods, sesame seeds and poppy seeds pack the highest boost of calcium, way above the alfalfa sprouts I had expected to close the gap. Another great surprise was that many of the spices I use in our winter foods, the kinds of spices often found in curry or gharam masala, are also some of the most calcium rich foods. These spices are mostly of the umbrelifa family: cumin, caraway, anise, fennel and coriander. It seems that calcium comes in small packages.

Well, after a lengthy pre-amble, here's some of the delicious foods we prepared with our bulk sack of soybeans...


First of all, here's a link to some tofu and soymilk recipes, since I won't be giving detailed instructions here. Basically, the beans are soaked and blended with water, then the slurry is boiled for 15 minutes to destroy the enzyme that makes raw soy indigestible. When it is filtered, the liquid is soymilk, and the pulp is called okara.

One pound of raw soybeans, which I bought in bulk for 75 cents a pound, made 3 Quarts of soymilk (in later processing I was more careful not to let the soymilk reduce like it did in my first batch below), along with about 4 cups of okara. I added a touch of sweetener and a pinch of salt to each Quart of soymilk, and I'm really pleased with the result. More about the okara below.

In my next batch, beginning again with one pound of raw soybeans, the filtered soymilk is re-heated and curdled, very similar to cheese-making, to form tofu curds. There are a few curdling agents, including calcium sulfate which would fortify our tofu with calcium, but I couldn't find it locally and used the more commonly found magnesium sulfate, or Epsom salts (be sure to use the salts made for internal purposes... read the label).

The curds are pressed in a cheese-press type of contraption, forming a nice firm tofu. One pound of raw beans produced 1 1/2 pounds of pressed tofu. The whey is mild tasting and makes a nice soup base or bread making liquid.

First tofu fry... tossed with a kale, red pepper and onion stir-fry... yum.

Now back to that okara. It retains most of the fiber and carbohydrates, and about half of the fat and protein from the beans. Here's a link with some really inspired recipes to use and enjoy this unfamiliar by-product of soymilk/tofu making. The patties below are made from the UnChicken Nuggets recipe in the link above.

Since the okara is high in soy-oil, it can be used to replace some of the fat in baked goods. It is also a fluffy type of grain, and can replace eggs for a slightly firmer texture in cakes or muffins. I tried the toasted okara recipe, which has a lightly nutty/coconutty flavor that can be used to replace toasted coconut in recipes, and it smelled so good, I decided to try a granola. I mixed half rolled oats and half cooked okara, omitting oil/fat, sweetened to taste, spiced to taste, added sesame seeds (for calcium!), and toasted in the oven as granola. It's absolutely delicious, better than traditional oat granola. I have no doubt we will find many ways to incorporate this new ingredient in our diet. Okara can even be dehydrated and ground, for easy storage, or to make your own soy protein powder.

Making tofu and soymilk at home requires about the same amount of time as dairy milk and simple cheeses. But the cost-return is higher than dairy products. 75 cents worth of soybeans yielded $6 of soymilk or $8 of tofu, not counting the okara and whey by-products. Soy milk can also be made into soy-yogurt, using the same dairy yogurt starter. Growing our own soybeans would no doubt, require less time and land than maintaining a single dairy goat, year-round, in our bio-region and climate. So for now we have soymilk next to the goat's milk; tofu 2-3 times a week and goat's meat 3-4 times a week. A happy hybrid.

Making Ghee

Ghee is a clarified form of butter, traditionally used in Indian cuisine and culture. But ghee has some advantages over butter, it has a higher heat tolerance, and can be stored at room temperature for months. We store our extra butter as ghee. For the most part, we use it like oil for frying, it does not burn at high temperatures like butter does. But it can be used in any recipe that calls for butter.
To make ghee, melt the butter on low heat. The best quality ghee is clarified slowly.

The butter will separate into pure fat, and milk solids. Most of the milk solids floating on the surface will eventually sink to the bottom, and what remains floating will be separated out of the final product.

Bring the butter to a very gentle simmer. All of the water must be evaporated out of the fat in order for it to store for long periods of time. I have kept pure ghee for up to six months without any deterioration of the product. Be careful not to burn the butter while it slowly simmers for up to an hour. This is best done in a double boiler. When the fat does not bubble any more, the water is cooked out, and the ghee is ready to be strained.

Pour the hot ghee through a fine-mesh sieve, or a few layers of cheesecloth. The best quality ghee is at the top, above the sediment line, so if you are planning to store your ghee for longer than a week, be sure it is free of sediment. I pour off the best ghee first, then pour the rest at the bottom into my "greasing pot", and use it like bacon drippings to grease cake pans, etc. Ghee stays in a semi-solid state at room temperature, somewhat like olive oil when kept in the refrigerator, but melts into liquid gold when heated.

To get a taste of the slightly nutty, buttery flavor of ghee, try simply frying eggs in ghee. It is a great cast iron seasoner, ever since using ghee, my cast iron pan doesn't stick, no matter what I throw in it. Or try popping popcorn in ghee, and drizzling some on the popcorn as well. No popcorn like it!

The goats have made fast friends with Pilgrim, grazing together as a herd. Juniper even stood in his barn, eating hay out of his mouth because she couldn't reach his manger!

Making goat's butter and yogurt

The kids are weaned off milk, we started weaning them at 8 weeks old, and completed the transition to warm water in the end of their 9th week. They are grass burners now, and they are doing quite well on a few bales of the best hay in the barn. Watching their condition closely for signs of dropping weight, we have been ready to feed them some grain, but their condition has held and even started to gain again in the last few days, and we would prefer not to feed them any grain as it changes the bacteria and pH balance in their rumens.

Now that the milk is all ours, I have been rubbing my hands together with all of my dairy desires. Butter and yogurt are on the top of the list. I have a mid 20th century cream separator, designed for the home dairy in mind, but that would be the home cow dairy. It is inefficient to put less than a gallon through the separator, so I saved up milk for two days, so that I would have a gallon and a half. When we were milking a Jersey cow, I separated the cream twice a day, and also had to wash the darn thing twice a day. So I am quite happy to reduce that chore to once every two days.


The milk must be warm to separate, between 95-105F, so I warmed it on top of a pan of boiling water, double-boiler style, to be sure that the milk did not scald.


The cream separator works just as well for the goat's cream as it did for the cow's cream. In fact, I think it separated better with the temperature of the milk above 100F. Cream is more viscous when it is warm, and does not stick to the discs inside of the separator as much. My pail of fresh cow's milk, after being filtered, would likely have cooled down to 85 to 95F by the time it made it to the separator. When I took the cream separator apart after the first run with the goat's milk, I noticed that very little cream had been left inside.


One perk of using a cream separator is that it makes perfect cappuccinos! I worked as a barrista at a fancy restaurant in my city days, and in my prime could hardly have made such perfect peaks as these.

I collected cream for 6 days, until I had a quart. It took about 4 gallons of milk to make a quart of cream, which would work out to 4% butterfat. The cream is perfectly white, instead of the rich creamy color of Jersey cream, but it has a delicate and mild flavor, and it kept well without going sour. I actually think that the goat's cream has a more mild flavor than the Jersey cream, and I had more problems with cream spoilage. I could usually only keep the Jersey cream for 4-5 days max before it would start to sour and make off-flavored butter. But not so with the goat's cream, it was still sweet and fresh on the sixth day.

Again, my butter churn is designed for the home cow dairy, and can fit up to 2.5 quarts of cream, but one quart is the minimum. It came with a small hand-crank, and I used to turn that handle for at least 20 minutes before churning the butter out, but Mr. Fritillary, always looking to improve designs, fitted the drill onto the shaft that the handle was screwed onto, and made churning butter into a 3 minute job.

For an excellent tutorial on making butter at home, head on over to Throwback at Trapper Creek's blog and read her post "Butter me up".

The goat's cream behaved just the same as cow's cream, except that it can be worked at a slightly lower temperature, between 55-60F.

The butter is pure white, and again, I would use the word delicate to describe it. Both in texture and in flavor. It was slightly softer than cow's butter when I was working the buttermilk out, due to the factor that it seems to melt at a lower temperature. I made sure to drain off the buttermilk first, it was sweet just like the cream, and great for baking.

The butter is delicious, creamy, mild, and not at all "goaty". Never once, in my home goat dairy experience, have I found either the milk, or any products of it, to be "goaty" in flavor or smell. We did try some goat's milk from the farmer's market before buying our goats, and found it to be slightly tangy, but not off-putting, and figured we would get used to the flavor. But the flavor of the milk, whether cow or goat, is often due to handling, cleanliness and freshness. And our own goat's milk is fresh, clean and from a healthy animal, and that makes all the difference.

One quart of cream makes one pound of butter, so I should be getting one pound of butter every 6 days, along with a quart of yogurt a day, and 1.5 quarts of skimmed milk a day. And that is with a single dairy-cross goat. It is perfect for us, and we would be able to put away plenty of milk and butter for the dry-season, as well as making cheeses, with one more dairy-cross, or with just one pure dairy goat. But with the two dairy-cross does, we will also be able to provide for our own meat as well, from the kids. And two does still consume about 1/3 the amount of one small dairy cow.

I couldn't resist making up some buttermilk pancakes with fresh butter, what a treat!

And with all of that extra skimmed milk, made some yogurt. Dairy heaven! In the past, I have purchased store-bought yogurt, Balkan style, with active acidophilus cultures, as my yogurt starter. But I thought I'd try the freeze-dried packets at the health food store. It has three bacterial cultures, including acidophilus.

The resulting yogurt has a thinner texture than I expected, but creamy and well flavored, slightly-tangy. In my second batch, I used 1/2 cup of yogurt from the previous batch, to culture each quart. I'm not sure that this yogurt will work well for drained-yogurt, a cream-cheese-like spread. If not, then I will try again with the Balkan style yogurt starter.

Making liquid dish soap

Finally got around to making a batch of soap. It is my second batch, and I am still a bit intimidated by the lye. I was also terrified of my pressure canner the first few times I used it, especially on the wood stove!

This soap used half beef tallow, half lard, and that seems to be a popular combination of fats, for consistency. My first batch was pure lard, and it was a great laundry soap, and dish soap. I like the creamy coloring that the tallow gives this soap. Although I'm not sure it came out so great, there was a bit of separation, it seemed that the two fats did not want to dissolve at the same rate in the lye solution. I kept stirring gently for at least 20 minutes and it only ever got to a lumpy honey consistency, not well blended. And there was a little bit of separation in the mold, like some of the glycerin had separated out. But it will work just great for laundry and dishes regardless. One batch of soap (4.4 lbs fat to one bottle of lye) does us for a year or more.


There were some great soap making tutorials up on blogs in the Fall, thanks especially to Throwback at Trapper Creek. But I haven't seen anything about making dish soap, or jelly soap. Jelly soap is the consistency of a good stock, and it can be mixed with water to use in hand pumps or as a liquid dish soap. I keep all of my bits of soap, too small to use, and I added them to the crumbles left over from cutting the bars of my new batch of soap. The recipe for jelly soap is 1 lb grated soap to 1 gallon water. Boil for 10 minutes.

I water it down, half jelly soap, half water. It does foam up with a bit of agitation, and works great for dishes. Cuts grease and leaves glass sparkling! We need a little jingle playing in the background. I thought it might work great for people using homemade soap in laundry machines. I use the bars with my ol' washboard. But this liquid soap would dissolve well in cold water wash cycles.

The kids are growing fast! The have doubled their size in two weeks, and are just about able to make a vertical leap over a 4 foot gate! Good thing we are planning to tether them in the summer. They have been nibbling on hay, but are just starting to actually eat a bit of it. Penelope is consistently giving 3 Quarts of milk a day, which is great for us, and as soon as the kids are weaned, we will have extra milk to make yogurt and cheese and butter! I did try some of the goats milk in the cream separater, and it worked, so I should be able to make goat butter.

Ditch the Fridge Challenge

I challenge you to Ditch your Fridge! With cooler, or down-right cold, weather coming on, it is a perfect time to challenge your dependence on your refrigerator.

When we moved off-grid, we came with a small fridge and small chest freezer. We had a small generator, battery bank and a solar panel. We could run the darn things, but it was ridiculously expensive to produce enough power to keep our food stored this way. I didn't keep much beyond dairy products in the fridge at the time, without a cream separator, the fridge was pretty full with pots of whole milk, bottles of cream and yogurt. Once it was skimmed, the milk was turned into cheese or fed out. I kept some leftovers in there, where space allowed, but mostly my fridge was an integral part of our dairy processing. The freezer was full of our year's supply of meat, some frozen vegetables and fruit, and extra butter and frozen milk to last through a two month dry period, before the cow calved again.

When we realized we had to make some changes, figuring out how to do without refrigeration was a huge challenge to the milk maid in me. I could do without the freezer, canning the meat, vegetables, fruit, and even the milk for the dry spell. What to do with the extra butter, stumped me until Mr. Fritillary enlightened me about ghee, a traditional Indian or Hindu way of processing butter into pure butterfat, which stores at room temperature like oil. So that took care of storing butter, when fresh butter is not in season. The freezer was soon empty.

I was hesitant to ditch the fridge, but with winter coming on, I was able to cool my twice-daily pot of filtered milk, in a basin of cold water, and let the cream rise in an unheated room that kept at refrigerator temperatures. I could also keep my cream and yogurt in the cold room, as long as winter lasted. But I knew I would need a cream separator by spring. We found one in time for warmer weather. Now I only had our daily table milk, a few liters of cream, a few liters of yogurt, and a pound of fresh butter to keep cold at one time. We do not have a spring or any running water on our property, but the water from the well stays quite cold, even in the heat of summer. We took an old camp cooler, and filled it with cold well water, and submerged everything into the water. Even the butter went into pint jars, same as leftovers or opened bottles of applesauce, etc.

The cooler is on an outside porch, where no direct sun falls on it at any time. In the heat of summer the water must be changed two or three times daily. I put the fresh milk, and separated cream into cold water, morning and night. And change it if need be again in the middle of the day. Come spring and fall, the water only needs to be changed in the evening, the cool night air keeps it cold, and does not start to warm up until late afternoon. In the winter, I change it every few days to keep the water from going stale, and even have to bring the cooler into an unheated room to keep it from freezing out on the porch.

Refrigeration can be done many ways. A small pump from the well can run to a cooling basin, with an overflow, to simulate a spring. Water is a more stable cooling element than air, so it works well. But air can be cooled by a small fan pushing air past a mist or trickle of cool water. In hotter climates, the ground temperature a few feet down can be cool enough to store food.

But designing a way to cool and store your food is only part of the challenge. You may also have to change the way you cook, and even the types of food you eat, to ditch the fridge. Take a look at the contents of your fridge. Eggs and many cheeses can be stored in a cool cabinet. Eggs store quite well at 60-70F for at least two weeks. The only reason they are refrigerated at the grocery store is so they can be kept for 3-6 months. Homemade preserves, pickles and jams will keep in a cool cabinet or submerged in the cooler, for a week, so preserve your food in one week sized portions. With a backyard garden, produce is eaten straight from the garden, and with the exception of lettuce, will keep in a cool cabinet for a few days. Vegetables like shelled peas or broccoli heads can be put into a jar or water-proof container, and submerged in the cooler and will keep fresh for a day or two. For the most part, the refrigerator only prolongs the distance food takes to get to your table. The fresher your food is, the less you will need your refrigerator.

The challenge I have set for myself next year is to expand my range of fermented vegetables. Many people prefer to freeze vegetables over canning them for the nutritional value that is maintained in frozen vegetables. More than just cabbage can be fermented, including beans, cauliflower, roots, and cucumbers. Even a medley of vegetables, onions, peppers, garlic and herbs can be fermented together. Fermentation preserves the nutritional content, since vitamins are never destroyed by heat, and pathogens are kept from spoiling the food with friendly-bacteria that also add their own health benefits to the foods. And fermented foods can be kept for months, or even a year, in a cool room at 50-60F.

Ditching the fridge is not only environmentally progressive, it can wean you off of a dependence on consistently available cheap power, and give you the opportunity to change your relationship to the food you eat.