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Soy Milk Makers are machines that help make small scale soy milk in the home. 

A soy milk maker is a small kitchen appliance which automatically cooks soy milk, a non-dairy beverage made from soy beans. Some soy milk makers can also be programmed to make almond milk and other vegetable-based beverages.

Home-made soy milk is usually at most one third as expensive as store bought soy milk—approximately $0.20 per quart. Additionally, it can be made to the drinkers' tastes and nutritional requirements, providing added value. Soy pulp or okara, a healthy by-product of soy milk preparation, can be used as an ingredient in many recipes and food products.

Ordinary methods for making soy milk at home are often very labor-intensive (requiring beans to be soaked, ground in a blender, strained, and then cooked). Soy milk machines perform many of these steps automatically, greatly simplifying home-based soy milk production.

Standard operation

Soy milk makers work similarly to a combination between a home blender and an automatic coffee maker. Properly-soaked soy beans are placed into the filter cup, where the machine grinds them into a fine paste. The soy milk is then filtered (in a process similar to that of tea making) into water which is heated, fully cooking both the soy beans and the okara.

Most soy milk makers include a mechanism to stop the boiling soy milk from overflowing. The heater is turned off as the water level approaches the top of the chamber, and then turned back on as the soy milk returns to an acceptable level. This process is repeated for the length of the cooking period, which lasts for approximately fifteen minutes.

When the soy milk has fully cooked, the machine will automatically turn off, leaving the okara in the filter cup and the soy milk in the water chamber. Many machines will beep to inform the user of the soy milk's completion.

Home-Made Soy Milk Recipe

Here is a recipe for home-made soy milk.  You can also purchase premade soymilk in many delicious flavors with calcium and vitamin D fortifications.

Ingredients
125g dried soybeans
about 3.5L of water

Yields
2L soy milk
about 2 cups of okara

Utensils
a hand blender
a large pot with, ideally, a transparent lid
a large can to hold the milk
a wooden spoon or another tool for stirring
a sheet of clean cheesecloth or dish cloth
a sealable container for the okara (optional, you can also elect to dump or compost it, or ferment it)

(Okara is a spongy, crumbly by-product of the soy milk and tofu-making process. While it is edible, it has little nutritional value and doesn't appeal to the palates of most people.

However, it can be made both more palatable and more nutritious by fermenting into tempe gembus, a form of tempeh made from okara.)

Procedure

Put the soybeans and 1L of water into the pot and let them soak for 8 to 12 hours.
Strip the soaked beans of their hulls by rubbing or crushing them between your fingers. Remove the hulls and pour away the excess water. While the hulls have about the same density as the beans and bean splinters, you can exploit their high flow resistance for separating the two: Fill some water into the bowl, then pour it away quickly enough to drag the hulls with it, but not so quickly that the beans will follow. This process resembles the winnowing of dry chaff from seeds. It's no problem if a few hulls remain.

Add 1/2 L of fresh water and blend until you get a creamy substance. Add another half liter and blend until totally smooth.

Bring the raw milk to a boil while stirring, then reduce the temperature to minimum, put the lid on top, and simmer for 20 minutes. Attention: May overboil, check frequently. Removing the lid will allow vapor to escape and reduce the foam. Another possibility is to pour a little bit of cold water on top of the lid.
The bitter odor of the raw milk should now be gone. Remove the pot from the stove and add 1 liter of cold water.

Line the inside of the can with the cheesecloth so it is completely covered, and the edges of the cloth hang over the edge of the can. The following process will not work if the body of the can is much wider than the opening, though. In this case, use a large bowl instead.

Carefully pour the cooked, unfiltered milk into the can. Then fold the cheesecloth together at the top and lift it up out of the can so that the filtered milk drips into the can. Rotate the bottom of the cloth against the top and use your hands to exert additional pressure upon the soy mass. Be careful not to burn yourself.

When you're no longer able to extract significant amounts of milk from the soy mass, open the cheesecloth, and put the resulting rubberlike, crumbly okara ball into the prepared container. Store it in a cool place for up to three days - you may also freeze it. Note: The okara requires much more heat processing than the milk in order to be digestible, e.g. boil it or bake it for at least one hour before eating it. The heat exposure during the baking of bread which contains okara is usually enough. Alternatively, it can be fermented into a special variety of tempeh.

The soy milk can be kept in the refrigerator for about 5 days. You can also use it to make tofu right away.

Sourced from wikipedia.org

Sourced from wikipedia.org