I made it through three decades of my life without ever hearing about soy milk. I had no inkling that it existed. Even though soy milk has been around for more than 2,000 years, I had never heard of it. And then, suddenly, the refrigerator was filled with soy milk. In fact, we started making soy milk ourselves at home.

Which prompts the obvious question: what is soy milk? To make soy milk, you start with dried soybeans. If you have never seen a soybean before, think of a dried black-eyed pea without the black eye. If you wanted to, you could grow soybeans in your backyard garden in the same way you grow green beans or peas, but most people buy the dried beans in bags at the store.

You take about half a cup of soybeans and soak them in water for half a day to soften them. You grind up the beans in a blender and boil the bean pulp in a liter of water. Then you filter the pulp out with a cloth and save the liquid. Voila – one liter of soy milk. It’s a little like making coffee if you think about it. If you use a soy milk maker, it will do the grinding, boiling and filtering for you, but it is exactly the same process. This video shows you how to make soy milk yourself:

What you have made is a liquid that is a lot like cow milk. One cup of “two percent” cow milk contains about 5 grams of fat (in the form of cream) per cup. Soy milk also contains about 5 grams of fat (in the form of soybean oil). Cow milk contains about 8 grams of dairy protein. Soy milk contains about 7 grams of vegetable protein. Cow milk contains about 12 grams of sugar (in the form of lactose). Soy milk contains about 5 grams of carbohydrates (many people add sugar to their soy milk to improve the taste and boost the carbohydrate level, but people on diets like the low-carb aspect). In other words, the two liquids are quite similar. But if you are making soy milk yourself it is very inexpensive compared to cow milk — about $1 a gallon. If you buy the beans in bulk, you can push the cost even lower.

Most people in America don’t like the taste of pure soy milk, so they usually add salt and/or sugar to it. You could add, for example, half a teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon or two of maple syrup to a quart of soy milk and it would taste a little more like cow milk.

For more info see:
- What is the big deal about milk? Why do people treat it like some kind of miracle drink?
- Soybeans: Natural Weight-Loss Foods
- How the Dukan Diet works