Sunday, September 29, 2013

Making Quinoa Milk for Soaps to come.

Lately in the supermarket, I have seen rows and rows of exotic milks. What exactly is Rice Milk? I've had rice all my life and never seen rice with an adder :). Ok, my first suspicion is that the box contain rice water, the stuff that's left over from washing our rice, now how can I justify paying for that? But I was totally wrong, there is a soap making channel on you tube call Soaping 101 and rice milk is more plain porridge. 4 cups of water and 1 cup of rice, cooked, grind and possibly filtered. I am definitely not paying for that!

I did buy the almond milk and the listed ingredient is mostly water (including 7% Almond, agava (sweetener)and corn maltodextrin. I'm ok with the ingredients but of course making it yourself you'll probably could do without the corm Maltodextrin (my son is allergic to corn) and it will be fresh, fresh, fresh. Practically like milking your own vegetarian cow!

Quinoa is so exotic, I've never heard of it. I did a little research on it and it has been hailed as the as a food with "high nutritive value," impressive biodiversity, and an important role to play in the achievement of food security worldwide and declaring 2013 as "The International Year of the Quinoa." It is interesting that this seed has anti-inflammatory properties and also has a fat content. It can only make a great milk for our soap, so starting to love it even before adding to our soap. Why did I decide to go with Quinoa? I've heard hempseed heart milk makes a great milk soap but let's face it, buying hemp hearts is not going to be easy specially with our anti-drug law. I can almost hear you guys who uses hempseed heart on a regular basis screaming "it has no hallucinogenic effect!" and it does look like crispy cereal from the photos. Perhaps when hempseed heart is better known and readily available in my organic shop I will use it.
Making the Quinoa Milk reminds me very much like making soy milk. It used to be such a treat when my mum makes homemade soy milk. This cereal seems to absorb a lot of water (used distilled water for soap sake) and admittedly I did burn the first batch! NOT TO DO: Do not grind the quinoa in the pot and then decide to put it back to the stove to see if you can get it softer! I kept it like I would with making rice porridge, without letting it dry out and cooking under very low heat. Once everything looks soft, I pureed (using blender in circular motion) the cooked quinoa and let it cooled. With soy milk, it is very trick. During the cooling process, it may ferment and turn solid with a nasty ordor. So I was a bit worried with the Quinoa milk but thank goodness it cooled without any problem. I double filtered and squeezed the milk out with a muslin cloth. I don't think the residue will be scratchy when I turn it to soap but after all that work, I wasn't going to risk it. Those of you who makes oatmeal soap will know that the unfiltered colloidal oatmeal may be scratchy when added to soaps. So this is step one to our Triple Avocado milk soap.

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