My wandering thoughts... How to make Soy Milk?

Soy Milk

Don’t know if you’ve ever tried it, but it’s pretty tasty in my opinion. Now you can’t go into drinking it think it will taste like milk because it doesn’t. It has milk-like properties, it has a milk consistency and a milk color (unless it’s flavored soy milk), it tastes good over cereal or with some cookies and it provides you with some pretty awesome nutrients. It’s a perfect supplement to our vegans out there or those of the lactose intolerant kind. There are tons of products out there which claim fame to soy. So how does soy which is a bean turn into these products? Specifically milk?

I am relying on eHow.com and Wikipedia to break this down for me. eHow c claims you can do this at home just FYI.

How Soy Milk is Made . . . Basically
Soy milk is made from soybeans. Approximately one pound of soy beans will make one gallon of soy milk. The beans are placed in a container with enough water to submerge them. They are to be soaked for at least three hours depending on the temperature, the colder the water the longer the soaking. The soaked soy beans are then sent through the grinder, an electric blender should do. The resulting mush is then boiled. It is boiled for a few reasons; heat destroys protease inhibitors which are naturally present in soybeans. Our pancreas naturally secretes proteases to digest a protein meal, eating raw soybeans on a regular basis causes the pancreas to hyper secrete, leading to benign tumors of the pancreas. Heating also improves flavor and sterilizes the product. When they say it improves the flavor, it’s like most things, we Westerners don’t like the original harsh or different flavors so we lighten or sweeten it up. Boil for 15-20 minutes and then strain out the pulp. Boiling the pulp after filtration is the Chinese method, as opposed to the Japanese method which boils first and then it’s filtered. Boiling first avoids the problem of foaming. Soy milk is then poured through a press fitted with a filter to press the milk from the soy bean pulp. And there you have it soy milk. Obviously packaging is a whole other

Nutrition
Soy milk has nearly the same amount of protein as cow’s milk. Natural soy milk contains little digestible calcium as it is bound to the bean’s pulp, which is insoluble to humans. Many manufacturers will enrich their products with calcium carbonate. Unlike cow’s milk it has little saturated fat and NO CHOLESTEROL!!!!

The above are the results of a random thought I had while driving.