Astonish people at your next dinner party when you tell them you made the tofu in the tofu dish. They never need know you made it with only soybeans, water, a coagulant and basic kitchen tools. Unless you send them to this blog. Which you totally should…
Homemade tofu does require some planning ahead—you must soak the soybeans many hours before you make the tofu (I start soaking the night before). You then make soy milk with the beans, heat the milk, add the coagulant, strain out the curds and form a blob of tofu. Pretty simple.
So why don’t I make tofu every week?
Because the process renders shockingly large amounts of leftover soybean pulp—or okara. We’re talking about five or six cups of okara for every pound of tofu.
If you don’t write a zero-waste blog or have OCWD (obsessive compulsive waste disorder), you could simply toss all of that okara onto your compost heap. But if you do write a zero-waste blog and have OCWD, you must think up ideas to eat up every morsel of the okara—and the results must taste delicious.
I have added a bit of okara to soup to thicken it, to granola for a yummy nutty flavor (add about 1 cup of okara for every few cups of oats) and now to make vanishing biscotti.
Okara Brown Sugar Biscotti
Ingredients
- 1 cup packed fresh okara, with as much soy milk squeezed out as possible
- 1 ½ cups flour
- ¾ cup lightly packed brown sugar
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- ¼ cup milk (I use the homemade soy milk that generates all of this okara)
Directions
1. Heat the oven to 325°F and lightly grease a cookie sheet.
2. Combine the first five ingredients—the okara through to the salt. Because I use fresh okara for this, the mixture will be lumpy. Use your clean fingers to break up the larger lumps.
3. Add milk and mix thoroughly with your fingers.
4. Shape the dough into two rectangles roughly 6” x 4” and place on the greased cookie sheet.
5. Bake for about 20 minutes, until very lightly browned and firm.
6. After the rectangles have cooled enough to handle, cut them into 1/2-inch slices with a serrated knife. Arrange the slices, sliced sides up, on the cookie sheet.
7. Return the biscotti to the 325°F oven. Bake for 10 minutes, flip, and bake 10 minutes longer or until golden, crispy and quite dry. If your okara was very wet, the biscotti will require more time in the oven.