Soy Milk Makers

If you drink soy milk but are tired of paying $3.50 for a half gallon, how does paying as little as $.20 per gallon sound? Get a soy milk maker.

Soy milk makers  are a great way to cheaply make any bean, rice or nut milk in roughly 15 minutes in your own home. Before soy milk makers, homemade soy milk was a labor-intensive process of soaking, pureeing, straining, and finally cooking the beans into milk. The soy milk maker combines blender and coffee-maker technology to condense the process into a few simple steps. Perfect for people with special dietary needs, especially those who are lactose intolerant.

Feature to look for

• Bean Type. Most machines use pre-soaked beans,  allowing for a 15 minute cycle, but there are models that use dry beans, bumping the wait time to 30 minutes but cuts the preparation time.
• Versatility. Soy milk makers can also work as tofu makers, so if this is a feature you want read the model descriptions carefully.
• Recipes. Most machines include a recipe guide with suggestions for cooking with not only soy milk, but also okara, the byproduct of the cooking process.
• Price. Soy milk makers cost around $100.

Recommendations

There are only a handful of soy milk makers on the market and reviews are scarce. Amazon  has a handful and several columnists at Green Barley have reviewed machines as well. All of their conclusions are pretty much the same: the SoyaJoy /SoyQuick  machines are the top choice. The two different names are brand names for nearly-identical machines.

An alternative idea is to look for a juicer that can double as a soy milk maker -- some of the higher-end models can do this.

Major Manufacturers

• SoyQuick 
• Nutritionist 
• Miracle 
• Salton 

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