Homemade Soy Milk, Way Better Than Silk!

Fresh soy milk is a quintessential Thai breakfast. It's one of the things I miss most about Thailand, but luckily it's easy to make at home. If the only soy milk you've had comes from a carton, you owe it to yourself to try a homemade one as they taste nothing alike! In this post I'll also show you how to have it Thai-style with all the add-ins!

Why Make Your Own Soy Milk?

In short, homemade soymilk and the commercial versions, such as Silk, taste nothing alike. And I mean NOTHING. IMO fresh tastes better, as you might expect. When I first came to canada, I bought myself a carton of Silk, thinking how convenient it is that I can just grab my favourite breakfast drink at the supermarket in Canada! I was so excited for my first gulp, only to be stunned by how it looked and tasted completely different from the soymilk I grew up drinking.

I did not understand how something that contains basically ONE ingredient (soybeans) can taste so different...until I looked at the ingredient list of Silk and realized there were many more than one, including thickeners and flavouring. No wonder. Here, they try to make soy milk taste as much like milk as possible because they're marketing it as a milk substitute. But in Asia, we drink soy milk for the joy of soy milk itself.

Thankfully, it's pretty straight forward to make at home. Once you know the process, you don't even really need the measurements. We never used any measurements growing up!

Soy Milk in Thailand

In Thailand, soy milk is called น้ำเต้าหู้ nam taohu (literally translated as "tofu water" which I know isn't the most appetizing but very much accurate, lol). Fresh soy milk is most commonly sold by street carts and is widely available, especially in the morning as it is typically enjoyed as breakfast. The soy milk is made fresh, day by day, and it's always served steaming hot, although you can chill it and drink it cold as well.

To make it a meal, we add various beans, grains, and other fun add-ins to make it more nutritious and filling, and I'll go through a few of these in the ingredient list. So it's kind of like a healthy version of bubble tea! You can order it sweetened or unsweetened, and some vendors also offer a black sesame flavour where they grind up toasted black sesame seeds in with the soy milk.

You can also buy bottled, ready-to-drink soy milk in Thai supermarkets and convenient stores, BUT not all off of them are pure soy milk! If you're vegan, check the ingredient list as there are brands (Lactasoy, for example) that contains milk ingredients.

Watch The Full Video Tutorial!

All my recipes come with step-by-step video tutorials with extra tips not mentioned in the blog post, so make sure you watch the video below to ensure success - and if you enjoy the show, please consider subscribing to my YouTube channel. Thank you!

Ingredients and Notes

If you only have soybeans, you can make soy milk, but there are a few optional ingredients to make it a little more special. For amounts, check out the full recipe card below.

• Dry soybeans, preferably split, which will take less time to hydrate and you wouldn't also have to deal with the exterior membrane, but whole soybeans will work absolutely fine.
• Water
• Pandan leaf (optional). Pandan leaves are aromatic leaves commonly used in Thai desserts. We often add it to soy milk for an extra aroma, but we're very light handed with it as we don't want it to taste distinctly like pandan. Pandan leaves are available fresh and frozen at some Asian grocery stores.
• Salt (optional). I like to add a pinch to balance the sweet, but often skip it. Try adding it to a glass and see how you like it with and without!
• Sugar or other sweeteners, to taste, optional. White sugar is fine, as is brown sugar or honey. Feel free to sub any sweeteners you want for a sugar free version.

Popular Add-in Options

To make soymilk more of a substantial meal, we love adding "stuff" to it, kind of like bubble tea! Here are some popular options, you can add as many as you want, or none. All of the beans and grains simply need to be cooked with no seasoning.

• Cooked red kidney beans or azuki beans
• Cooked hulled mung beans (split),
• Cooked job's tears (aka coix seeds), these are my favourite and they are a texture similar to barley, but less chewy. Pic below.
• Hydrated lemon basil seeds (pic below), med mangluck in Thai, they swell up in water like chia seeds. Simply add hot water to the seeds and wait 5-10 minutes. Cold water works too, it'll just take longer.
• Tapioca pearls, typically we use large, white tapioca pearls, but small ones will also work.
• Agar agar jelly cubes, agar agar is a kind of jelly, and ones added to soymilk are usually plain and lightly sweetened. Read more about agar agar in my agar jelly recipe here.
• Young coconut meat. This is a more recent trend, but I love it!

How to Make Homemade Soy Milk นำ้เต้าหู้

Here are all the steps to make this recipe. If this is your first time, I highly recommend watching the video tutorial to ensure success.

1. Rinse soy beans and soak in plenty of water. If using whole beans, soak for at least 8 hours; if using split beans, soak for at least 3 hours. To check if soybeans have fully hydrated, split the beans in half and check if there is any darker colour in the center of the bean (dark spot means it hasn't fully hydrated).
2. Optional step (see note below) If using whole beans, leave the beans in the soaking water and scrunch them in your hands to remove most of the skins. and the skins will be rubbed off.
3. Once you have removed a lot of skins, the skins will naturally sit above the beans.
4. Pour off the water and use your hands to push the skins out with the water. Add more water and repeat the process until most of the skins have been removed, but you don't have to remove ALL of the skins.

Note: I have found that if I don't remove the skins, the soy milk sometimes end up with a beany aftertaste. However, this depends on the beans because I have also had batches, made with different brand of beans, that did not have the after taste. You can make a small batch as your first and see if it tastes okay, and if it does, you don't have to bother with this step.

5. In a blender, add the beans and add just enough water to blend. Blend until smooth.
6. Once blended add more of the water to thin it out, leaving about 1 ½ cups of water for later.
7. Set a sieve or colander over a pot and line it with muslin or a few layers of cheesecloth. Alternatively you can use "nut milk bags" which are made for this purpose. Pour half of the puree into it, stir to drain off most of the liquid.
8. Once most of the liquid is gone, gather the edges of the cloth, twist t and squeeze the remaining milk out of the pulp.

9. Open the cloth, then pour in half of the remaining water to "rinse" out any remaining soy milk.
10. Strain and squeeze one more time, and repeat with the other half of the puree.
11. Heat the soymilk with pandan leaf (if using) over meadium high heat, stirring constantly, and once it starts to bubble, lower the heat down as low as you can to maintain a gentle simmer. Simmer for 20-30 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the soymilk no longer has a raw, grassy smell.
12. Remove from heat, add salt and sugar as desired. Enjoy hot or cold, with or without the fixins!