I’ve recently started to change my diet until I now only eat vegetarian foods. I’m also cutting out dairy products like milk, cheese and yoghurt from my diet and eating soy or rice-based products instead. So, in the last week, I’ve been to numerous stores across the city in an effort to find out where can you buy soy yoghurt in Bangkok, Thailand. In a country where soy milk is available everywhere, soy yoghurt apparently isn’t. In fact, I’ve yet to be able to find soy yoghurt anywhere in Bangkok.
So, the answer to the question ‘Where can you buy soy yoghurt in Bangkok, Thailand?’ seems to currently be. ‘Nowhere’, as vegan friends who have also tried to find it will attest to.
If you, like me, love yoghurt but want the soy yoghurt you used to eat at home, I do have two suggestions, however.
1) You can make your own soy yoghurt at home with soy milk and a yoghurt starter. As I’ve yet to find a yoghurt starter in Bangkok either, at least one that isn’t dairy based, I decided to start making my own soy yoghurt at home using a half carton of plain cow’s milk yoghurt to get started.
Sure, it’s not ‘vegetarian’ but, as a stop gap until I can find a starter to make soy yoghurt from the normal soy milk I buy in Bangkok it will do. After all, the next batch I make using yoghurt from the original batch as a ‘starter’ will actually have less cow’s milk and more soy milk and on and on.
If I keep using yoghurt from each new batch as the starter for the next batch, eventually the amount of cow’s milk in it will be infinitesimal. So, even with the initial use of cow’s milk yoghurt, I’ll still end up eating soy yoghurt, which is far far healthier.
b) You can use the stalks of red chilis as a starter, as I recently discovered on a blog written by an Indian woman. Apparently, chili stalks are used often in India to ‘start’ a yoghurt and they work very well. Check out more about how to use red chili stalks to make soy yoghurt here.