soy beans to tofu

i have been a busy bee using my ikon blender like no tomorrow - making diff types of milk - oat milk, oat & almond milk, soy milk. and now i can save $$$ as i no longer need to buy lite white twice a week - i just need to make my oat & almond milk a couple of times a week instead!

i have successfully made soymilk from scratch, but tofu with nigari was too hard in texture! (and bitter too) now that i have resolved the problem of the supply of "gypsum" and clarified the dangerous mislabeling of "borax" vs "gypsum", i am happy to proceed (again) with my "home-made" tofu making


here you can see my bargain tokyo-mart container with strainer ($2.50 only!), my hard-to-get-gold-dust "gypsum" and baby tofu settling after addition of gypsum... how was it done? i had 1.5-2 L of home made soymilk (made from 3L water, 400g beans)... i heated the milk to 75 degrees C, then stirred in the gypsum solution (3tbsp gyp with 100mL cold water dissolved)... once there was a teeny-tiny sign of coagulation, all stirring / touching / agitation stopped and the baby tofu let to settle for at least 10 mins...

after 10 or so mins and the baby tofu is set, with great care, i scooped it out into my bargain strainer in container lined with muslin (soup bag from chinese shop)... the curd settled and the whey (yellow liquid) drained out into the underlying big bowl... whey tasted yuk!

look at my pretty baby tofu resting in my in bargain containers!

then i had to fold them up like presents with the muslin and gladwrap ontop and weigh it down with my tinned pulses and tinned tomatoes... yeah... let the whey out!

and there it is after unwrapping - my 2 blocks of 1/2 bargain container full home-made tofu from scratch... my bargain strainer in container doubles up as a tofu container in the fridge! what a bargain!! remember to store the tofu in filtered water and change this daily...

so at the end of the day, 400g of dried soy beans which cost $1.45 ended up into 2 blocks of 1/2 tofu as well as my lovely "sweet silky tofu dessert" (one bowl only all devoured by mcduck - could only capture a pic of 1/2 bowl remaining)... the silky tofu was scooped out at the end of the 10 mins settling period and a brown sugar syrup was pour ontop (home made of course)... mcduck suggested ginger sugar syrup... may be next time...