I've started making tofu recently, and the one thing that bothers me is how much okara I end up throwing away. Since I'm not drinking the soy milk, and just turning it into tofu immediately, what's the problem with just leave the okara? I assume the tofu will be less flavorful, but it's not exactly strongly flavored to begin with. Will it mess up the coagulation process?
Leave the okara in when making tofu
tofu
Related Topic
- Cheese – How to make homemade tofu more flavorful
- How to prevent tofu from falling apart on the grill
- The whey of mozzarella or tofu
- Use agar as a coagulant to make homemade tofu
- Soymilk for drinking vs. soymilk for tofu making
- Types of tofu that can be used in a crock pot
- Undercooking tofu causes a bad stomach. Is this true
- Are all the processing steps of tofu harmless
Best Answer
The okara has some unextracted protein and sugar but it also has a large quantity of fiber. That fiber will prevent the protein from properly coagulating. If you leave in all the okara you get soybean porridge.
I imagine you could leave in a portion of the okara and you would get a fragile but hearty tofu. The problem with this is that, with most tofu recipes, the beans are not cooked long enough for the okara to be palatable. With all that sugar it would also give rise to much more flatulence.
You don't have to throw the okara out. There are many recipes that make use of the okara for its fiber. It is pretty straight forward to use it in baked goods. Toasting it gives it more interesting flavor.
If you want to look into tofu-like products that use the entire bean you could research tempeh. The whole beans are fermented so you get a meaty product with all the nutrition of the whole soy bean.