Making Soy Yoghurt

I’ve turned into the person I used to mock.

During uni I lived in Glebe, which is a surburb filled with ‘alternative’ types. I used to laugh at them with their dreadlocks going into the heath food store – bloody hippies!

Well now I’m buying organic food, growing my own vegetables, and today I sank to a new low. I made soy yoghurt.

In my defense, it is because Little D has recently been diagnosed with an allergy to cow’s milk protein. This means that not only can he not have milk, but also cheese, butter, yoghurt and anything that has casein or whey added to it. That includes a large percentage of processed foods, even those which you wouldn’t normally think contain milk. Soy cheese for example commonly uses casein as a starter. All kinds of plain crackers use milk protein in its various forms.

Thankfully, D has taken very well to soy milk. He didn’t even seem to notice it was any different. Depriving him of cheese and yoghurt however has been a different story. Whenever J eats either, D reaches out desperately, making a sound that I can only liken to the sound that kids make when they have their hands up in the classroom and want the teacher to pick them.

Eh, Eh, Eh, Eh!!!

Then we have tears.

Soy milk goes into the canister

So being reasonably familiar with the yoghurt and cheesemaking process I set out to make some soy yoghurt. I’ve outlined the steps for cow’s milk yoghurt previously, and the process is essentially the same.

I used (Woolworth’s brand) Macro organic soy milk. I poured it into the yoghurt making canister, and added the culture. I’d read that the yield on soy yoghurt was lower, so I used approximately 3 times as much culture as I would for normal yoghurt.

Adding the culture

I then added a large pinch of sugar to give the cuture something extra to eat. Soy milk does have some sugar that is digestible to yoghurt culture, but not as much as cow’s milk. I didn’t want to make the yoghurt sweet though, so I only added a little. I then closed the container and put it in the yoghurt maker for about 16 hours.

Soy yoghurt before straining

After that time I put the yoghurt in the fridge for a few hours to firm up a bit more before straining it.

Now you’ll notice from this picture that it differs quite a bit from normal yoghurt. The whey is yellow and the yield is much lower.

With cow’s milk you don’t even need to strain the whey off, but (with this batch at least), quite a bit of whey needed to be strained off before the consistency was right. I strained it through a normal wire sieve, but I think I could have increased the yield by using a finer sieve or some cheesecloth. Not spilling it all over the window sill may also have helped.

Finished Soy Yoghurt

In the end I yielded a little over 500g from 1 litre of soy milk. Not bad I guess for about $2.50.

The flavour is different to cow’s milk yoghurt. It has the required sourness, but there is that definite soy flavour.

A flavour that only a hippy could love.