Okara Recipes for Healthy Vegetarian Cooking

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An okara sampling: (clockwise from top left) soymilk, no-meat sausage roll, raisin-soy cookies, soy burger supreme, carobola, and a cornbread loaf.
An okara sampling: (clockwise from top left) soymilk, no-meat sausage roll, raisin-soy cookies, soy burger supreme, carobola, and a cornbread loaf.
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Raw soybeans (front), moist okara (right), and creamy soymilk (left).
Raw soybeans (front), moist okara (right), and creamy soymilk (left).
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Cornbread sticks.
Cornbread sticks.
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Squeezing soymilk from cooked soybean/water mash.
Squeezing soymilk from cooked soybean/water mash.

Okara. Oh-kar’-ah. The name is unfamiliar to most people in the United States, but it ought to be as well known as sweet corn! Nutty-flavored, low in fat, and high in protein and fiber, this versatile soybean meal is possibly the most nutritious and inexpensive food available to the American consumer today. To help you incorporate it into your diet, we offer tips on how to use okara and where to obtain it, as well as some delicious okara recipes. But first, you might be asking: what is okara?

Okara is a byproduct of the making of all soy “dairy” foods. After the soaked soybeans are ground to a fine mash and cooked in water, the strained concoction yields soymilk and okara in a 2:1 ratio. In commercial operations, the creamy liquid is used to make bean ice cream, soy yogurt, and tofu, but the nutritious meal is frequently given away as livestock feed.

Lucky critters! According to William Shurtleff, coauthor of The Book of Tofu, okara contains a higher-quality protein than its sister soy foods: tofu, soymilk, and soy whey. You see, although the pulp retains only about 17% of the original protein, the amino acids in it are more equally balanced, thereby forming a complete and very absorbable protein. Calculations done by Frank and Rosalie Hurd, the authors of Ten Talents, reveal that just one cup of moist pulp contains approximately seven grams of protein, or about as much as one large egg. And that same cup offers you substantial amounts of iron, calcium, phosphorus, and vitamin A, in a mixture that’s extremely high in fiber and almost devoid of fat.

How to Use Okara and Where to Get It

People who cook with soybeans traditionally dry the strained meal, grind it into flour, and use it as we do wheat flours (although okara contains no gluten). However, in this country, most soy products are “disguised” in commercial preparations, and very few are actually used in home kitchens. (The underappreciated soybean has only recently been welcomed at the U.S. dinner table, and it still suffers from an “image problem.”) Consumers are just beginning to cook with tofu and to season with miso. And okara? Why, that sounds too exotic for most Westerners to even consider using. As a result, the ever-increasing number of American soy-food factories simply cannot market all of the bean meal they produce. Michigan tofu-maker Pam Klingbail, for instance, uses a small portion of her bean pulp to make a tasty “soysage” (soy sausage). Some of the remaining mash is also given away to bakers, but most of it, she concedes, goes to farmers for high-class livestock feed.

  • Published on Sep 1, 1983
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