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?
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.
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
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!
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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.
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Or are you describing something entirely different and I just got confused by your description of the sauce?
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(I find the cheese association a bit odd. Perhaps because I don't especially like any cheese that looks like _that_.)
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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.
Freah, white Indian cheese
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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
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