Soyabella
We bought a machine to make soy milk so here's how it's going so far and how much we expect to save with it.
Specifically, we bought a Soyabella[1] "plant-based milk maker" early January and I'll write more about why we got this one specifically at the end of the post.
But first, how much soy milk do we use each week? According to the internet, adults need 1-2 cups of soy milk per day, and our toddler 1 cup, which is around 7L each week at a minimum for our family. This lines up very closely with the 3-4 1.89L cartons per week we used to consume.
How much does that cost? A carton of milk is around $4 per carton when it's on sale which works out to $2.12/L. That's about $15 per week—or around 16% of our grocery spending—on soy milk alone.
In contrast, if we make soy milk ourselves it only costs $0.39/L because the dry soybeans come to only $0.29/L of milk and the equivalent amount of calcium fortification is just another $0.10/L. That's less than 1/5 of the cost!
With the Soyabella we have time to make milk 3-4 times per week. This produces 4.2L of milk meaning we have to cover the remaining 3L with store-bought. This is fine because the store-bought milk is fortified with vitamins and minerals like calcium and so that's what we give our toddler to drink and we use the homemade milk for baking and cooking mostly. So using the Soyabella and buying extra milk comes to around $7.50 per week—half of what we were spending before.
We got the Soyabella for $183 so it will have paid for itself in about 6 months at this rate of use.
Why Soyabella
Why did we buy an expensive Soyabella and not just make milk on the stovetop or with something else? We experimented for many months using different pots, different heating elements, different blenders, different types of strainers and even other types of soy milk makers, but we always ran into the same problems:
- Too difficult to clean. Having to wash pots, blender parts, bags and strainers is a tremendous hassle. Not to mention that if you boil soy milk on the stove, there is a high likelihood it will boil over and make a huge mess.
- Too time intensive. Some methods and equipment take a lot of time and you can not leave pots of soy milk unattended on the stove or you risk it boiling over.
- Too much sediment. Nut bags were one of the best ways to eliminate sediment but took a long time to strain the milk and were difficult to clean on a semi-daily basis. Other methods that were easier to clean let too much sediment through.
We tried some other soy milk makers but they often lacked the ability to filter the milk the way we wanted, and that's the big advantage we found with the Soyabella. It has a fine-mesh filter cup the beans are blended inside of so they don't get into the larger body of milk and this greatly reduces the amount of straining and cleanup required.
This ease-of-use translates to more homemade soy milk which in turn means we save quite a bit of money. It's not perfect and the soy milk lacks the various additives companies add to their milks so we probably wouldn't go 100% homemade unless we make sure we're compensating for those losses, but for the amount we save it's definitely a purchase we are unlikely to regret.
I should point out that I get nothing from the company who makes the Soyabella, I'm just writing about it and our experiences with it. ↩︎