Adventures in Soy: Soymilk, Okara Cake, and Vegan CrabCakes

Being unwell at home has its advantages: boredom breeds big kitchen projects. Happily, I was well enough to mill about the kitchen, and we had a package of dry soybeans lying about.

I started off by making soymilk, for the first time ever. I had two recipes on hand: one from The Homemade Vegan Pantry and one from The Tofu Book. The former advocates boiling the beans for one minute and the latter instructs to soak them overnight. Since I wanted to go through the whole process from start to finish that day, I went with the former approach.

Making soymilk is a multi-step approach. It starts off with boiling a great quantity of water in a big pot. Then, the beans are added to the boiling water and boiled for one minute. The pot is then removed from the stove and left to cool for 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes, I drained the beans. I put some of them in my blender with fresh water and blended to the point of creating a thick slurry. I then poured the slurry into a nut milk bag over a big bowl, squeezing with all my might. The milk dripped into the bowl; okara, the by-product of soymilk, was left inside the bag. I repeated the process in batches, until all soybeans were blended and milked. I ended the process by simmering the milk for ten minutes without letting it boil. Contrary to the book’s promise, the soymilk retained much of its original, beany flavor, which some absolutely love. I’m not very fond of it, but it can be partially masked with some vanilla extract. I might make tofu out of the milk I have, but I don’t think I’ll make this process a habit. Next time, I’ll try the soaking method, but I suspect it’ll yield a similar outcome.

The silver lining of the entire enterprise was the okara; I was left with so much of it that I packaged and froze four cups. I was left with enough fresh okara for two feats: a dried fruit cake and Miyoko Schinner’s “fab cakes”, which were a resounding success.

The recipe for fab cakes is in The Homemade Vegan Pantry; it requires a lot of ingredients, but fortunately I happened to have odds and ends of everything at home. I encourage you to buy the book and try this recipe. It’s fantastic. The cake itself is made mainly of okara and silken tofu, so it’s rich in protein and fiber, and it also contains quite a bit of delicious nori. Having missed crab cakes quite a bit, I was delighted to have such a delicious substitute.

The recipe for dried fruit cake is my own, so I’m happy to share it:

1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup fresh okara
1 cup boiling water + 3 tbsp room temperature water
1 cup mixed dried fruit (raisins, cranberries, apricots, figs)
4 tbsp flax seeds
2 tbsp brown sugar (and I think this would come out fabulous even without sweetener)
1/4 cup olive oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp hawaiiej for coffee (but I think you can do without)
1 pinch salt

Heat oven to 350 Farhenheit.
Pour cup of boiling water over dried fruit and leave aside to plump a bit.
Grind one tbsp of the flax and mix with three tbsp water. Leave aside to become gelatinous.
In a big bowl, mix oil, sugar, and vanilla. Add flax and dried fruit (with the liquid) and mix some more. Then, add all dry ingredients and mix just until combined. Pour into pan–I used my trusty silicone bundt cake pan–and bake for about 40 minutes, or until a knife plunged into the middle comes out dry and clean.

I’ve done some more reading on okara. It seems that you can easily substitute about 1/2 of the flour in almost any baking recipe with okara, though some websites prefer the use of dried to fresh. Since I used fresh okara, I can attest that it doesn’t harm the final product; the cake came out marvelous, fluffy and moist, and makes a delightful breakfast treat. What with this and the fake crab cakes, I feel like I got a lot out of my soymilk-making adventure–including newfound appreciation for commercial unsweetened organic soymilk, which I plan to continue buying most of the time!

No New Jail in San Francisco… Now What?

The long-standing debate about the construction of an alternative to San Francisco’s Jail no. 4 at 850 Bryant ended yesterday with a victory for the jail opponents. The supervisors declined to allocate funding to the new building. The advocates who fought against the new jail tooth and nail took to social media to proclaim their victory.

Unfortunately, the alternative–keeping the situation as it is–does not strike me as something to feel particularly victorious about. As I told the Chronicle the day before the vote, the outcome is dismal either way.

The anti-jail advocates are right in saying that we have been housing people that should not have been incarcerated in the first place, and that the high percentage of people with mental illness in the jail suggests that what we need is a mental institution, not a correctional one. They are also right in fearing the construction of a building with more capacity, because our collective experience with incarceration is that new beds tend to fill with new inmates.

I’m sympathetic to these arguments, but they are also somewhat short-sighted. An increase in incarceration is not the only evil under the sun. Unsound, unhealthy incarceration conditions are very problematic as well. Since the existing jail is seismically unsound and dilapidated, the result of the anti-jail victory is basically a temporary return to the status quo, which is dangerous and undesirable. And in the long run, if Jail no. 4 ceases to be operative and there’s no alternative, the concern is that other jails will become overcrowded and unhealthy.

This is not the first adverse incentive of the move to close down prisons. When prison budgets are cut without an equivalent reduction in prison populations, what you get is less prisons and more overcrowding in existing, inadequate facilities. 

So, what’s to be done? The only way out of this maze of bad alternatives is to do the hard work of an empirical survey. Let’s analyze the San Francisco jail population. How many people are there because of a sick money bail system who could otherwise be out on O.R.? How many people should be receiving medical treatment that they can better get in a medical facility? How many people are doing long, realignment-type time in an institution unsuited for a lengthy stay? A budget cut on its own does not lead to a cut in incarceration. It’s time, indeed, to move to another system of rationing punishment: return on investment.

Fueling the mental health system and reforming the money bail system (hopefully by legislating the bail bonds industry out of existence) costs money. Possibly a lot of it. But it has to be properly budgeted and invested. Just saying “no” without providing, and budgeting for, a viable alternative, may be touted as a victory, but it leaves San Francisco jail inmates in the lurch.

Reiter on Solitary Confinement

Keramet Reiter of UC Irvine has recently done a Q&A with the Berkeley Human Rights Center on solitary confinement, her topic of expertise and focus of her forthcoming book.

Will the recent court settlement in California lead to any significant change in regard to solitary confinement practices?
Two big challenges with isolation in particular are that it’s been a very secretive process and there has been significant discretion over what circumstances and for how long people are sent to isolation….Now, under the recent settlement, you have to do something wrong instead of just being labeled a gang member and isolation terms are capped at five years. So that’s an improvement. But you still don’t have a right to a lawyer at the administrative hearing in which people decide whether you’ve done something wrong or not. The prison staff have a lot of control over what counts as a rule violation and who they charge with violations. Five years is a long time, and you’re under really intense scrutiny when you’re in isolation, and it’s easy to break more rules because of that.

Read the whole thing here.