okara zine

[frandroid]

About 6 to 9 months ago, my partner decided to buy a "soymilk maker", which is a combination blender-pressure cooker where you put in soaked soybeans with water, you turn it on, and it cooks and grinds your soybeans into a pulp. You filter the resulting product and you get soymilk. What gets cast off is a sludge that the Japanese call okara. Personally, I would just throw it in the compost, because there really aren't many great recipes for the stuff out there. It's mostly flavourless bean filler. BUT it should not be wasted, and now we have surplus rapidly filling up our freezer.

In spite of selling zines for 20+ years (!!!!!), I've never made a zine myself. I've had a few ideas over the years, and I have one project that's a bit more advanced than others, but nothing close to completion.

Of course, to a zinester, "can't find this anywhere" is a publishing opportunity! So I've decided that I will put together a cookzine of okara recipes. I've already made veggie sausage, some sort of yemiser w'et (Ethiopian dish), and okara-augmented mashed potatoes. This seems a lot more straight-forward endeavour than my other zine ideas. I should aim to make a beta version for the anarchist bookfair in Montréal in May... I have to stay on top of the surplus, so huh, lack of storage is the mother of creation... *grumble*

Your suggestions and ideas are welcome.

Comments

[ioplokon]

There is a recipe on one of my fav cooking sites: https://www.justonecookbook.com/okara-unohana/

[frandroid]

Thank you! I love the crazy amount of detail she goes into :)

[ioplokon]

It's really impressive bc it's awesome SEO & gives her space to plug sponsored products but also like, is genuinely helpful & relevant, especially if you're learning a new technique or want to adapt the recipe.

[springheel_jack]

compost isn't waste.

[frandroid]

Compost is good, but it would be better if we ate it. That's how one thinks when coming from a background of great poverty... I mean, it's edible, it's just a bit too much of it.

[springheel_jack]

you can always try fermenting it into soy sauce or something.

[frandroid]

Interesting!!

[springheel_jack]

I wonder if you could use that in various ways in place of polenta. Or if you could figure out a binder, as the mass for a faux sausage patty.

[frandroid]

I'm not a big fan of polenta so I'll probably try once or twice, just for the purpose a coming up with a recipe, but that'll probably be it. :)

I used a post-punk kitchen sausage recipe that's mostly gluten flour, but also uses white beans, and replaced the beans with okara. That worked fine. The next time I'll try increasing the proportion of okara, because it wasn't that much okara. I'm also going to follow this model to make burgers...

[sabotabby]

This is my thing with aquafaba. I volunteer to taste test?

[frandroid]

Yeah but at least you don't have to feel too guilty about throwing out aquafaba, it's mostly water. You can water it down and use it on your plants. Maybe if you combined it with okara, you could make a quiche...

Yes, there will be some tasting when we can eat outside again. Maybe I should make a giant batch of food to launch the zine. Haha.

[sabotabby]

There are so many great launch/tie-in ideas.

[belleweather]

I'm pretty sure that if you mix it with koji and put it in a jar for long enough it becomes Miso. This is probably not relevant if you're in a place where you can get miso easily, but I am not so I'm kind of envious of all your soymilk-byproducts.

[frandroid]

Whoa, this is becoming mighty interesting! Thanks for the suggestion. Maybe I send you a bundle if I successfully make miso? :)