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The short version: To make one cup of vegan buttermilk, add one tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar to a measuring cup. Next, pour in enough soy milk to reach the one-cup mark. Stir a bit. Wait a couple of minutes.
This soy buttermilk doesn’t contain the good bacteria present in cultured buttermilk and you might not drink it plain (you might not drink cultured buttermilk plain either) but it does turn out delicious soda bread and biscuits and rolls. And producing soy milk consumes less than a third of the water needed to produce cow’s milk, according to this handy water calculator.
The soy milk
I do make soy buttermilk with homemade soy milk but this vegan buttermilk will work with store-bought soy milk as well. You do not need to make the soy milk to make the the buttermilk. But if you want to make the soy milk, go here for the instructions. I cut that recipe in half. One cup of soybeans yielded over five cups of soy milk plus a generous cup of okara (soybean pulp) that I’ll add to a batch of granola (in the meantime, I stored the okara in the freezer).
The acid for curdling the soy milk
Usually, I choose lemon juice to make quick buttermilk but because I brewed fabulous rhubarb vinegar in the summer, I wanted to try that instead for the batch pictured in this post. (I made this soda with rhubarb instead of strawberries and let it ferment past the bubbly sweet soda point to the flat mouth-puckering vinegar point.) Apple cider vinegar will also work.
Distilled vinegar will curdle soy milk but it may be derived from petroleum-based ethanol, according to best-selling, award-winning author Kirsten Shockey in her wonderful book Homebrewed Vinegar. I’d prefer not eat this.
Today, distilled vinegar [in the US] is made directly from ethanol. Although US regulations require it to be fermented naturally, producers do not have to disclose the source. As you might expect, producers typically use the cheapest source of fermentable sugars available to them—commodity grains, wood cellulose, or even petroleum-based ethanol.
Kirsten Shockey, Homebrewed Vinegar
As with the soy milk, you don’t need to make your own vinegar. But unlike soy milk, homemade vinegar takes only minutes to prepare and then brews itself over a few weeks without any additional work on your part.
How to use the soy buttermilk
I “make” my quick buttermilk as needed, on demand. In the cranberry soda bread pictured below, I simply substituted the soy buttermilk for the dairy buttermilk in this recipe. My non-vegan family devoured it. Enjoy!
Vegan Buttermilk Made With Soy Milk
- 1 tablespoon lemon juice or apple cider vinegar
- scant cup soy milk
Place 1 tablespoons of fresh lemon juice or vinegar in a measuring cup. Fill the cup with soy milk up to the 1 cup mark. Stir. Set the milk mixture aside for a few minutes to thicken and curdle.
Use immediately or refrigerate any leftovers for up to a week.
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