With a soy milk, yogurt and now an ice cream maker, I run through quite a lot of soybeans. A great local source of organic U.S. grown (a Cali's worker said their source is from Nebraska) soybeans is
Cali's Natural Foods, about $1.33 per pound. Right next to the bin filled with the yellow soybeans are black soybeans. I wasn't aware that black soybeans existed, but after a friend asked me why I didn't use them, I didn't have a good answer why. So I decided to experiment with black soybeans, especially after learning that black and yellow soybeans are nearly nutritionally identical. Most of the experiments were successful and nearly identical to their yellow bean counterparts.
Purple Soy Milk
The
recipe/directions comes from one of my vegan idols,
Bryanna Clark Grogan. I've been making soy milk following her recipe for more than a year now and highly recommend it. There is even a recipe if you don't have a soy milk maker, though I can't vouch for it. Depending on what recipe you use, a pound of soybeans makes between a gallon or two of soy milk. It beats the $2-$3 for a half gallon of commercial soy milk. I use the
SoyQuick Premier Milk Maker 930P, recommend by Bryanna and myself.
Purple Soy Yogurt
I used to eat soy yogurt all the time, but I wasn't too keen on the plastic containers that piled up in my recycling. Not to mention that my favorite company, Whole Soy, didn't use organic fruit so I decided to try making my own. Plus, I can use organic/fair trade sugar. I use the
Tribest Yolife Yogurt Maker YL-210, recommend by Bryanna Clark.
Recipe from her as well. I'm going to try and make tempeh in the machine and I'll post if it's successful.
Purple Tofu
Part of the reason I justified buying a soy milk maker was to make my own tofu. It's a pretty even ratio, about a pound of soybeans for a pound of tofu. You need to make three batches of soy milk so with one machine it kinda sucks. I've refined my technique a bit but it's still time consuming and not as good as commercial tofu and not that cost effective. The black tofu came out gummy. I'm not sure if it was because of the soybeans or something I did.
I pan fried the purple tofu and tossed in a pad thai sauce for purple tofu pad thai.
Recipe from another one of my vegan heroes, Chef Chloe. It's hands down one of the best vegan pad thai recipes that I've tried.
Purple Tofu Pad Thai
