Sur La Table Roaring Brook Dairy Tofu-Making Kit

The kit includes 3 cups of soy beans, some cheese cloth, a plastic tofu mold, and an instruction flyer. The instructions are very high level and completely useless if you run into problems. The process includes soaking your beans, then blending them in two batches in a blender, then transferring the blended bean mush into a pot with water, bringing them to a boil three times and stirring the foam that has built back into the mush. Then you are supposed to simmer for 10 minutes. So far so easy. Of course, it could say that if you don't keep stirring your pot continuously, you will end up with a nice layer of burnt beans on the bottom. But they just assume that you clue in on that. Anyways, the real problem starts when you are told to pour some of the stew into a double-folded cheese cloth, close the cloth, and then twist and squeeze the "milk" out. Sounds quite easy. Problem is that the mush is so thick, it will not even pass through a colander or any kind of strainer without any cheese cloth. Yes, you can squeeze some milk out, but you have to press the cheese clothed mush really, really hard. How do you do that when the mush is still boiling hot? How do you even close the little cheese cloth in a way that no mush will squeeze out, when you press as hard as you need to? Does this have to be milked when hot, or can you let it cool down a bit? After trying cheese cloth, a nut milk bag, tongs, and various strainers to get any kind of liquid out of the mush, and yielding only about half a cup after 30 minutes of straining (and reviving some choice curse words in my vocabulary), I gave up and spent about an hour cleaning my kitchen. I then went and bandaged my burnt hands.Bottom line: this kit is not for the faint of heart. If you have nut milk making down and know how to squeeze liquid from steaming hot mush that desperately wants to hold on to it, then this kit might be for you. But chances are, that you won't need this kit, then, anyways. For all others, please note that this is not a kit for absolute beginners. You will just waste your time, a couple of cups of soy beans, maybe burn your hands, and make a mess out of your kitchen.UPDATE: I tried making tofu again, this time with a new batch of soy beans. I used the same measurements as in the original kit and the mush turned out much lighter than with the beans included in the kit, i.e., where the original beans yielded a very thick mush with a consistency of porridge, the same amount of beans from the new batch yielded a pretty liquid milk with a consistency of a cream soup. I did not use the cheese cloth that the kit provided (it tore during my first attempt at using this kit), but a kitchen strainer and then a nut milk bag, and milked the ground beans in no time and with minimal effort. I added lemon juice to coagulate the soy milk, which worked beautifully, and then re-used the plastic mold that comes with this kit to press the curds int o a nice block of tofu that tasted exactly like store-bought tofu. I think I would have rated this kit five stars if it worked like this with the included beans. I add one star from my previous rating for a good second run. Maybe I received a bad batch of beans with the kit or maybe each batch yields different thicknesses of milk or mush. Still, I feel that this kit is targeted at people with no knowledge in nut milk making, and so I think the instructions should tell you what consistency the ground beans should be instead of just telling you measures of beans and water in cups and providing no explanation or trouble-shooting advice. If soy bean batches are in fact so different, it would also be nice, if the manufacturer would do their part on QC and test each batch of beans to make sure they yield a usable result. If you like to tweak, this is a nice kit, just don't purely rely on the included instructions.

Cool kit, Tofu mold reusable, does not come with enough cheese cloth in my opinion, and as easy as they might make it sound it is a process, but the tofu was awesome, soy beans say they are organic and non gmo

I made this last week and it turned out great. Honestly did not notice a difference between my finished product and store bought tofu in terms of taste. It came out to be a "firm" texture.Like the other Roaring Brook Dairy kits, you should read the instruction slowly and carefully ahead of time and follow them EXACTLY. If you do this, then it will turn out great! Don't forget to soak the beans the night before. Yield was about a standard brick of tofu that you would buy in a store. You can also use the press to make more tofu on your own.Only con I will say is that it is about 45 mins of actively making the tofu, whether it is stirring, pressing, draining, etc.- so make sure you give yourself enough time.