If to-fu is made from soybeans, shouldn't kung-fu be something made from peanuts? [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

←

→

Over the decades, my attitude toward tofu has slowly changed...

"Tofu? I've heard of it. I guess I should try it someday."
"Tofu is non-toxic and not foul-tasting, but those two qualities are not enough to make it food. And the evidence I've ~~seen~~ tasted does not support those repeated assertions that it 'picks up the flavours of the other ingredients'. And besides, anything that looks enough like cheese to make me expect to taste cheese and then tastes like nothing should be considered evilly deceptive."
"I've discovered what it takes to turn tofu into food: a Thai chef!"
"Okay, using Thai food as a 'gateway cuisine' I've come to unerstand that there are other foods in which tofu is non-evil, but I'll continue using the Thai-chef line because it gets laughs from some people and understanding looks from others."
"Hmm. anniemal came up with a tasty tofu-based snack food. Maybe it's time for me to start experimenting with the stuff again and see whether I can unlock its secrets. Can I still get away with using the Thai-chef line?"

But is it terribly wrong of me, that nearly every time I taste tofu in a non-Thai dish and find it acceptable, I find myself thinking, "Hmm. Not bad, but it'd be a lot better with a chunk of cheese on top"?

←

→

There are 32 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

Until recently, my attitude about tofu was much like your 2. It's certainly edible, but it fails to have enough features for it to be pleasant. To me it doesn't resemble cheese, it doesn't resemble _anything_, really, so it tastes quite appropriately like nothing at all.

On my recent trip to NYC I had found tofu fried with some manner of sweetish saltyish sauce, so it had actual flavor _and_ texture. Oh wow, I thought, tofu can be _food_! So far, I'm waiting for the experience to repeat before making generalizations.

Was the tofu in kind of puffy triangles, and was the sauce a dipping sauce, dark with flecks of basil and peanut crumbs on top? If so, that's either the first or second way I encountered it in a Thai restaurant, and still my favourite tofu dish.

Or are you describing something entirely different and I just got confused by your description of the sauce?

[link] [parent] [reply]

Entirely different. What I got was not Thai at all. The sauce was vaguely teriyaki-ish, definitely no basil.

[link] [parent] [reply]

Ah. Let me know if the experience turns out to be repeatable (and if so, the name of the dish).

[link] [parent] [reply]

Shall do.

(I find the cheese association a bit odd. Perhaps because I don't especially like any cheese that looks like _that_.)

[link] [parent] [reply]

There's a white cheese thhat shows up as cubes in Indian curries... And I first encountered tofu in places where I'd expect cheese even if the expected cheese would've been a different shade.

But mostly my "better with cheese on top" is because one of my first thoughts to improve a bland dish s to turn it into a carrier/substrate for cheese.

[link] [parent] [reply]

Paneer. YUM!!

[link] [parent] [reply]

I've had something like this as an appetizer in some Japanese restaurants. Little slibs*
of tofu, about the size of thick pats of butter, in a brown soy-based sauce with sesame
seeds.

* typo for "slabs", but it made me giggle so I left it

[link] [parent] [reply]

Age tofu/dofu - I've seen both spellings (pronounced "ah-jay" I believe). Really tasty. They serve it cold, but I bet it would be fine hot, too. "Slibs" - somewhere between "slivers" and "slabs". I like it!

[link] [parent] [reply]

I've encountered competently done tofu and don't mind it as such, but the treatment it gets around my food canteens -- basically, take a slice of off-white stuff, slice it, and warm it -- doesn't get any enthusiasm out of me. I also don't believe that ``picks up the flavor of things around it'' line.

I keep wondering what the folks who keep saying that mean. (Though it can pick up flavour from a marinade...)

[link] [parent] [reply]

I've had the triangles of tofu that you mentioned before in Chinese restaurants, and they really vary in taste and texture. Someone told me that the best ones are pressed and fried, and then put into a brown sauce. I used to go to a place quite often on my way to massage school in Manhattan and ask for broccoli with garlic sauce with tofu added. It was quite tasty. I also used to make a dish called "tofu egg-less salad". It had pickles, nutritional yeast, celery, tahini, turmeric, and some other things I can't recall at the moment. That was also very tasty - lots of my non-vegetarian friends enjoyed it with crackers.

I don't know if the tofu exactly "picks up the flavor" of the sauce or other ingredients, but in at least those two dishes the texture is nice and perhaps it's the "tastelessness" of the tofu that just lets the other tastes come through.

[link] [parent] [reply]

Tofu is best when it's not pretending to be something else. Personally, I find it more like soft-cooked egg-white than cheese, so the absence of cheese-taste isn't as jarring.

That might work if I hadn't been so often surprised by finding out that little cubes of the stuff in places where one would expect cheese turned out to be tofu ... I'll try thinking about egg whites for a while before looking at the tofu the next time I eat it, and see how that changes my taste/texture expectations.

I think the reason I like it in Thai food is that there (at least in the dishes I've tried) it's neither pretending-to-be nor substituting-for something else. Another guest at a party I attended once decided to take over the host's kitchen and start cooking for everyone (despite there having been plenty of party-fare already set out ... I thing he just got smacked upside the head by the cooking muse or something); among the things he whipped up was a sort of tofu scramble which was pretty good (at the time I declared him the exception to the Thai chef rule -- IIRC he was Chinese); that was a more eggy use of tofu than I'd encountered before, which fits with what you said.

[link] [parent] [reply]

katbot and I eat about 5-8 lbs of the stuff a week. I have gotten quite good at cook with it and have a few tips should you wish to try and make something palettable out of the relatively bland stuff.

Use Firm or Extra firm, these types of tofu lend themselves better to most recipes without becoming shapeless mush.

Press the tofu well before cooking with it. Tofu is stored in water and as such it contains a large ammount of moisture. Failure to press the tofu before marinating or otherwise cooking with it will prevent the flavors from soaking into it. I generall press the tofu by placing 1 or 2 one pound blocks betwwen two dinner plates and then stacking a bunch of cans of tuna (16) on top. Pour off all excess fluid, If this doesn't result in firm/dry enough consistancy I sometimes pop the plate with the tofu into the microwave for a few minutes to boil off a little of the moisture still deep inside.

Once your tofu is pressed you can basically substitute it in any recipe which calls for meat. I'm fond of making stir fry with it by first seasoning a wok with several tablespoons of peanutoil, crushed garlic, minced ginger, and a diced white onion. The tofu is chopped into cubes and added, then cooked over HIGH heat until it begins to brown on the sides similar to what you would expect from a cubed chicken breast. I then usually add chopped mushrooms and broccoli florets. Further flavour is added by tossing in a bit of fish sauce, shoyu, rice vinegar, whitewine, crushed red peppers, and coarsely ground black pepper to taste. A pinch of white sugar and corn starch dissolved in warm water can be added after a few minutes to thicken the liquid into a sauce that will coat the veggies and tofu. I like mine over rice, but

katbot prefers hers on an empty plate :) Yum.

Also, last night I whipped up a little italian by doing the above pressing/microwaving routine and then making breaded tofu cutlets and baking them with parmesian cheese and then topping with a homemade tomato basil sauce I whipped up.

The thing about tofu is that it is mostly flavourless and the texture tends to be too mushy for most western pallettes. If you do the whole pressing bit above and stick to firm or extra firm tofu you can usually end up with some decent dishes and if it tastes horribly, you can just eat the vegies and/or sauce :)

Apparently the meaning of "extra firm" varies from brand to brand.

Dishes that are basically meat recipes with something else substituted for the meat don't appeal to me as much as ones that were conceived as vegetarian (or meat-optional) from the start, in general, so perhaps part of my slowness in warming up to tofu is that when I went veg, I didn't miss the meat. (In fact, I find some TVP dishes downright unpleasant if they mimic the texture of meat too well.) The big excepton is my ought-to-be-famous vegetarian chili, which is modelled on my mother's chili con carne as a starting point before all the Glennish touches are added. In that, cracked wheat takes on the job that the ground beef usually does, without actually pretending to be meat.

I'm not good at stir fry (argh! it looks easy!) but that's on my list of skills to improve already; I can see using tofu as a minor ingredient in a vegetable stir fry once I get decent at that.

Thanks for the tips.

[link] [parent] [reply]

I don't really use recipes so it was sort of a halfassed comment for me to say substitue for meat in meat dishes. Basically my cooking style is to familiarize myselof with the flavor of all the ingredients separately and then combine them in ways that are inspired by how I interpret the flavor combinations from different styles of cooking that I've tried before. Which is to say that my "subsistute for meat" instruction was to say that the subtle nutty flavor queue of tofu when combined with a good tamari or shoyu fills in the part of the flavor boquette that would normally be occupied by chicken, beef, lamb, etc... I'm only sorta vegetarian (I prefer the term meat reductionist), I guess the proper term is ova-lacto-pisco-vegetarian; hence the fish sauce suggestion in my earlier post. At any rate,

katbot can't stand things with meaty flavors and textures and she quite enjoys my tofu dishes so they can't be too "meaty" :)

Another good one that I forgot to mention earlier is teriyaki broiled tofu. I generally use a store bought teriyaki sauce ("soy vey veriyaki" or something equally kitschy sounding) and just layer the pressed sliced tofu into a casserole dish so it make a single layer with little gaps, then I pour enough sauce over it to fill all the gaps and leave a very thin layer of tofu over the top. I then broil this until the top of the tofu is brown and slightly singed where the sugar from the sauce has carmelized at the edges of the dish. I then pile mixture of broccoli and roughly chopped onions on top that have been marinated in a mixture of honey, rice vinegar, apple juice, crushed red pepper, and tamari. I then reduce the oven temp to about 400 degrees and put the layer tofu and veggie casserole dish on the middle rack with a lid (usually an inverted cookie sheet) and ook for an additional 5-10 minutes depending on how well cooked I feel like having my veggies. While it's baking I often reduce the marinade in a sauce pot with a bit of cornstarch to thicken for use as a sauce over the finish product. NOTE: while this is cooked in layers you will find it impossible to serve in layers, I usuualy just use a slotted spoon to dole out heaping mounds of the veggie/tofu goodness and then spoon a bit of the sauce over the top. Goes super good with a nice Ale :)

[link] [parent] [reply]

If I wasn't hungry before, I am now. I'm going to stick my neck out and say that Trader Joe's extra firm is my absolute favourite tofu for anything but a soup, which I hadn't thought of before, (I'm thinking a substitute for roux, in part. There is nothing like flour fried in butter for soup except onions fried in butter.) but will put in the queue to consider. My diet is being overhauled, and I'm poking around at all kinds of combinations that are low-fat, high-protein, low Na, slow-absorption carbohydrates, tryptophan timed right, etc.

The recipes you gave hold great possibilities. (I loathe cooked mushrooms.)

I'll do a tofu entry in my journal. After I eat. I do the pressing, and heartily recommend it: but slice it first and use paper towels in between slices to speed it up. They can be dried and reused. Usually for something icky. Patience of some sorts is not one of the virtues I've been given.

Umm, erh, not to be hypercritical, but a palate is the roof of one's mouth, where the olfactory nerve endings hang out, contributing to the experience of taste, or a taste for certain flavours, which I think is what you meant. A pallette is the board an artist mixes zir paints on, or the range of colours from which a given work is comprised. Or a panel in the armpit in French armour. A paillette is either foil used in enamel work or painting, or a round spangle on a piece of clothing. Sorry. Whack me if I'm wrong. My dictionary isn't helping, though it dragged me in.

[link] [parent] [reply]

Trader Joe's extra firm is THE BOMB! I prefer their organic extra firm over the other kind they have as it always seems to be much much more firm. As for the mispelling, I rarely bother to spell check, but appreciate your headsup ;)

[link] [parent] [reply]

My handiest TJ's only has organic. Didn't know they carried another kind. Okay, we're thinking in the same track tofu-wise (not a word, I know, but useful here).

[link] [parent] [reply]

I actually like tofu, though I don't eat it all that often. I think it has a mild, slightly weird taste.

I have never thought that tofu dishes would be better with cheese, and when I try to imagine cheese + tofu, nothing good occurs.

On the other hand and now that you've brought up the subject, stir-fried ground pork and chinese vegetables in a spicey sause with melted cheese on top might be quite a good idea.

If I just eat a chunk of uncooked tofu, I can tell that it does have a subtle taste. But that taste usually vanishes entirely in the presence of any other ingredient. (I am reminded of the PDQ Bach bit about the lute and bagpipe...)

[link] [parent] [reply]

As the name suggests, various ways to make non-dairy cheeses ...
including using tofu, cashew butter, oats, and such. Nutritional
yeast usually gives things a cheesy taste too. My fave in it is a
vegan 3-"cheese" lasagna which utilizes tofu for one of the cheeses.

Also a goodie: baked tofu with various flavorings ... usually in
health food stores. Great for stir-fry.

Another nice usage of tofu: see if you can find chocolate Silk brand
soy milk. :-)

What

anniemal came up with is baked.

I hadn't really thought of soy milk as being tofu; is tofu an intermediate step in making soy milk?

I haven't tried chocolate Silk, but I've had the vanilla (and plain but I don't remember whether it was Silk or another brand). The nutty flavour is much more pronounced in soy milk than in tofu; you can still tell it's soy milk even in the presence of decently strong other flavours.

[link] [parent] [reply]

I think soy milk is more likely an intermediate step in the making of tofu, if it runs on cow milk's normal lines.

[link] [parent] [reply]

Oops, my bad, my train of thought started as soy products and I
accidentally typed that it was derived from tofu.
The chocolate cover-up in Silk is pretty good. When I went vegan I
had this idea to gradually go from dairy milk to soy milk so I mixed
them 50/50 and tried to drink the combination. Result: now I cannot
go near either dairy milk OR soy milk without gagging.

The chocolate silk does a better job of mimicking a chocolate milk
than most other competing brands. Admittedly my view of what dairy
milk tastes like is skewed, but I would say it tastes closer to dairy
chocolate milk than other chocolate soy milks I have tried.

[link] [parent] [reply]

But I *like* toad food.

I think you've got a hole in the pocket where you keep your consonants.

[link] [parent] [reply]

Tofu == best carrier for soy sauce ever. Soak, sear, eat. I could live on that and fresh veggies indefinitely.

tofu, like most things, is at its best when deep-fried.

Or for a similar effect with less oil, tofu can be dipped in egg milk mixture then covered in a breadcrumb corn meal mixture and baked YUM! A little black pepper, dried basil, and Oregano added to the bread crumb mixture makes it even more delicious and some cheap "shakey cheese" style parmegean sharpens the flavors a bit too.

[link] [parent] [reply]

I'm going to curry some rices now. *drool*

[link] [parent] [reply]

Links

January

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
1 1	2 1	3 1	4 1	5 1	6 1	7 1
8 1	9 1	10 1	11 1	12 1	13 1	14 1
15 1	16 1	17 1	18 1	19 1	20 1	21 1
22 1	23 1	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31