After years of having cereal make me nauseous,* I self-diagnosed mild lactose intolerance. In fact, my sister independently arrived at the same conclusion at around the same time, and ya know, genes, so clearly we are both correct. My awesome former roommate is also an adult soy milk convert. Since our combined degrees in subjects like library science, women’s studies, and earth science make us extremely qualified to make medical decisions, you should trust our advice.
It wasn’t until about a year ago that I went all-out and stopped using milk in almost everything, including tea, which is a pretty big step for me. Part of the reason it took that long is because milk alternatives (I will not forgive myself for writing the words “milk alternatives” in a public space) are pretty foreign. My guess is that if you are an American grownup in 2011, you weren’t raised with soy milk or its nondairy friends unless your upbringing was, like, way hippie. And my upbringing was a little bit hippie (see: that Country Joe and the Fish album cover my dad claims to be on), but mostly just involved copious tote bags. There was no soy milk.
So after a year of hard work, I have some basic rules of thumb for buying and consuming soy milk. And because you did not ask, I am sharing them with you. Who knows, maybe if breakfast makes you nauseous too, I will have done a good deed. I promise it’s not too scary.
No, really, everything after the jump is about soy milk. I’m sorry if you were expecting something more exciting. If you like cow milk, I’m down with that. The rest of this post is probably not for you.
Step 1, Buying Soy Milk (cue the Strong Bad learning music from the famous “skills of an artist” Trogdor sketch)
- There are many kinds of soy milk. There are like 4 kinds of cow milk (skim, 1%, 2%, whole) and whether you get it from the Dairy Barn or Whole Foods, it tastes roughly the same within each category. Soy milk can sorta do whatever the heck it wants, and will therefore taste different, even among similar flavors from different brands. You can broadly figure out whether you’re a plain or vanilla person first, and then narrow it down to brand. But I know of no efficient way to find your favorite brand other than to go a little nuts in the Nature’s Marketplace section of Wegmans. I’m sorry if you don’t live near a Wegmans. This project might be harder for you.
- If you’re me, you might think you dislike soy milk in general because you’ve only had soy milk you don’t like. I’m not gonna hate too hard, but I discovered I don’t like vanilla in general, and I specifically don’t like Silk as a brand. And I have a feeling that vanilla Silk is super common because it’s readily available even in non-weird supermarkets and it tastes like vanilla! I like vanilla, just not in tea. So stick to your sick-of-being-sick guns and try different kinds. My weapon of choice is Westsoy organic unsweetened. (Note: plain does not always equal unsweetened. This is important for me.)
- As you can see, my process was strongly flavor-motivated. But you might be interested in the nutritional content. Just read those boxes, because again, soy milk can do whatever the heck it wants. It’s not necessarily going to be healthier than regular milk is, whatever that means for you. So you gotta do the homework. Just know what you’re buying and be down with whatever’s inside.
Step 2, Storing Soy Milk
- This part is super easy. Milk is a pain. You always have to be worried about it. Soy milk doesn’t spoil as easily as milk. You don’t even need to store it in the fridge until it has been opened. Just think, regular milk can’t have a backup in the pantry for if you run out some morning. Someone just has to put on shoes and go to the Corner Store when that happens. (Yes, ours is actually called The Corner Store.) Or you skip your milk-based routine that morning, and then you get to work and you’re some weird monster who’s like, “I didn’t have my oatmeal!!!” and no one wants to be in meetings with you.
- Once opened, soy milk is fine to hang out in the fridge for a while. I actually still don’t know how long it keeps. You just give the carton a little shake before you pour, and it’s fine. If you use it daily, even in small amounts, you will run out before it turns. I’ve even used it after returning from a trip, and it has been fine. Shhhh.
Step 3, Cooking with Soy Milk
- This part was the hardest for me. Messing this up earlier this week prompted me to pen this post. Fair warning.
- We still have regular milk on hand because Dave is proudly a whole milk drinker, so I usually use milk in cooking. It tends not to irritate me for cooking or baking. (I use soy milk for tea, oatmeal, other “splash of milk” activities. I still don’t like cereal after years of forcing it down.) But then people are like, “Oh, it’s totally fine to cook with, just use it like regular milk.” Which is an intriguing idea, and is sometimes true. And sometimes very not true. In my experience.
- You CAN: incorporate it into baking or cooking where milk is not the main event. It works completely seamlessly in muffins, scrambled eggs or omelets (for real! and yes, it’s funny to use vegan milk in eggs), anything that wants a tablespoon of milk for almost any reason, etc.
- You CANNOT: use it where heated milk is the main event. The two that have messed me up real bad are hot chocolate (I know, I know, what was I thinking) and bechamel (again, I know, I know, what was I thinking). In my experience, soy milk is even fussier to heat than regular milk, and you end up with a weird flavor that is not. good. Just, it’s bad. Trust me.
- Conclusion: if a recipe says to add milk, and then multiple components are later heated, that’s fine. If a recipe says to put milk in a saucepan, that’s not fine.
- The good news is that if you’re only mildly lactose intolerant (is that even a thing? or are my sister and I just making stuff up?) and you don’t have moral or other dietary objections to dairy products, you can use regular milk in bechamel. And you can unfortunately avoid hot chocolate, because you are screwed either way. If you live with a milk drinker, this is super easy. And if you don’t, then you just need to do a little planning ahead and pick up a tiny container of milk before you cook tasty baked pasta dishes. And I won’t tell anyone if you cut the milk with water in those instances, so that you feel better psychologically about knowingly consuming a product that makes you a little ill. (Using “ill” still almost always reminds me of that N’Sync song. The one that ingeniously rhymes “ill” with “feel.”)
So now, go forth! Consume soy milk! Once you have it a few times, it just tastes like your normal morning routine. And if that new normal morning routine means you no longer dread breakfast, then more power to you. Don’t worry about the haters. They don’t know our pain.
*Okay, it’s not that unreasonable that this continued for years unabated. I had one of those Mysterious Undiagnosed Chronic Medical Conditions crop up in middle school, which I now know to be a completely controllable fainting disorder, but which wreaked havoc on my daily routines until I figured out how to manage it. It included a sudden hate of most breakfast foods, but a need to eat every few hours, so there was this Rocky training montage where I forced myself to eat breakfast, queasiness be damned. Not. Fun. So that’s why it wasn’t until about a year ago, once other kinks were worked out and I still didn’t like breakfast, that I decided milk was among the culprits. Because yes, other things were ruining breakfast too. The efforts to keep myself conscious and not nauseous are intricate.
