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Ingredients of the week: Mushrooms,Cranberries, Brassica, Beetroot, Potatoes, Cabbage, Carrots, Nutritional Yeast, Miso, Buckwheat
Cuisine of the month:
Now I'm wondering how I can cook some up at home on the stove top with a skillet and use it as a meat substitute. It's way cheaper than ground hamburger, $3 for tofu versus $7 for beef.
I'd probably do TVP or crumbled tempeh instead of tofu, but it depends on the context of what you're trying to make
tempeh
What's that taste like?
A little bit nutty, a little sour a little bit savoury. It has a more beany flavour than tofu ime
Like PointAndClique said - it's a little "funky" so it can be a bit of an acquired taste. It has little chunks of fermented soybeans in it.
A recipe book I have has this pretty good dan dan noodles recipe where you crumble it and cook it with shallots and seasoning to top the noodles with (instead of the ground pork you often find with that dish).
Deliciousness.
Thanks, looks like I can do a tofu twist on my favorite beef tacos.
ALSO
it may not seem important now and some tofluencers' recipes may say you don't need to do this, but press your tofu! If you have to, sandwich it between plates and put a heavy pot full of water or a stack of books on top for at least 15 minutes (though more time only helps, albeit with diminishing returns).
More water you squeeze out in the pressing stage => more room for flavors to soak into the tofu when marinading/cooking/resting and also less water to sog/stop the crisping when you cook it
tofu tacos are incredibly easy:
tofu in pan -> mush around -> add spice mix -> mush around -> add to shells -> done
add more steps where you feel the need, like adding lettuce or cheese or whatever
That's my way of preparing fast tacos anyway with beef
With the added benefit that you won't have diarrhea if it's not cooked right.
Certainly. If you ever feel like tofu doesn't quite have the protein density you need, seitan is amazing (and very meaty in texture)
Seitan's great, but generally kinda expensive to buy and more of a pain to make at home than some other things
It can be a bit of a pain in that it's spread out over time, but compared to pressed, marinated, and seared tofu, seitan made from vital wheat gluten (and not from flour) takes about the same amount of inactive time with maybe 15-20 minutes of additional active time per loaf
I will say it took me nearly 10 weeks of making seitan twice/week before I really liked what I was making. There was a lot of trial and many chewy glutenous errors. Both require a decent amount of patience to really learn and get right imo
I was just watching a video about making mock ground beef with extra firm tofu. Lemme go find it.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elnRctjp9rk
I haven't tried this yet and it looks like a bit of work but promising.
If there is an east asian grocery store (all three Korean, Chinese and Japanese should have them), you can find ingredients to make mapo tofu if you are into a bit of spicy food.
Very simple home tofu with a pan is basically fry it up in slices then coat in any sauce you like. The texture of sliced and fried well can be delightful with a firm tofu. And it'll take what ever flavor you like. Fry it with garlic why not
Tofu, when prepared properly (and I can't stress that enough), is a fantastic ingredient. The problem is that most westerners have absolutely no clue how to prepare it properly.
Mapo tofu is one of my favorite dishes and you should check it out.
To be fair where I live you only get one type of tofu.
as a dish or as an ingredient? because tofu is not a dish, but you can make a large portion of tofu recipes with just one firmness level tofu
As an ingredient I haven’t checked Asian supermarkets in a while.
I'm literally reading this thread while eating Szechuan tofu...
i'm convinced that i would be so much healthier if vegetarian cuisine was more dominant in this country. it's especially delicious in the contexts or cultures where meat is rare because that's where it shines the most due to centuries of refinement through trial and error. culinary contexts like the beans-rice-tortilla heavy mexican peasant diet; or cultures like the spice heavy indian cuisines or the soy example that you shared are my favorite.
It's pretty easy to replace chicken since it tastes like nothing on its own. Most of the flavor is in the spice and seasoning so I just use those spices and seasonings on whatever protein I'm cooking it.
A lot vegan stuff online tries to be "healthy" which is why it's associated with being bland but there's lots of stuff like fries and mushroom gravy, apple pies, pancakes, chips, fruit or soy based ice creams, pizza and panzerotti with plant based cheeses (much less oily too), things like chocolate, though some substitutes can be expensive. I don't even notice the change but it was really difficult when I was younger and thought I had to eat only stuff like salads.
The meat industry is one of the main drivers of unhealthy consumption in the country, and directly linked to an insane amount of negative effects. we need to radically reduce its presence in all society, ideologically that can only be done with some education on animal products and the processes to get there.
It should be abolished, not "radically reduced," unless you mean radically reducing it to being non-existent.
The veggie food-by-weight buffet place I used to go had the most delicious and greasiest food ever.
with all due respect how do white people make tofu
they steal it
Have to prepare those tofu blocks right, something really heavy, a pan or plate that can take the weight, and absorbent towels. Its the same with not running fresh mushrooms under water, you don't want all that excessive moisture.
Freeze it, get the extra moisture out, dry it out a little bit, marinate it, let it dry a bit more, and fry it up.
Cutting extra firm it into thin slices, adding oil and rubbing salt and pepper into it then frying it on a pan is also good.
I would to freeze it overnight, press it and marinate and then fry it after coating it in starch and other fancy stuff but I realized it's good when made simply as well
yeah, some restaurants just fuckin nail it. Others are just as bad as doing it at home with no real plan or preparation or idea how it is done.
there's a cambodian place in my area that does an amazing job with it in various stir fried dishes, and another that makes a wonderful soft silky mapo tofu
Get soy/soya chunks from an international section or store, they need a tutorial on how to make them but they're extremely cheap and shelf stable. They just need to be soaked and squeezed a few times to meditate aftertaste but I never really cared about it lol. I fry them to make burritos with a mayo (no egg) and siracha base. More dark texture than tofu.
you can also get soy puffs that are wonderfully chewy and spongy so they will soak up whatever you put them in.
Fried Tofu > Fried Chicken don’t @ me
if you like spicy food this mapo tofu recipe someone posted a month ago is pretty tasty and easy: https://hexbear.net/post/3458216
the hardest part is acquiring the Doubanjiang (also sold as broad bean sauce or paste in the west), I hard to narrow it down to like 5 jars out of a hundred sauces in my local asian grocery store, and then scrutinize the labels on each to make sure I was getting the right one
miso can be skipped, tbh I thought it was a bit too salty when included so I skipped it the second time I made it and it was still pretty good
My strat with my local asain grocer is just to show them the woks of life or Wikipedia page for an ingredient and say "sorry, I am not good at finding or pronouncing things. Do you stock this?"
I'm fortunate my area has a sizable Chinese and Vietnamese diaspora, cause I didn't know that stuff was hard to come by.
This is a great recipe I make fairly often. Chinese grand dad knows his shit.
If you want something easy and tasty doing beer battered tofu with a cheap beer like Pabst that you mix with about equal parts flour, or just dredging them in corn starch and seasoning is great for getting them crispy too.
One of the best dishes I’ve ever had was a tofu dish at a French place in Portland. I’m not a huge tofu person, and I don’t really associate tofu with French food, but it was perfect and I still think about it.
https://www.seriouseats.com/seriously-asian-frozen-tofu-recipe
This is my recipe for making tofu for people who don't think they like tofu. It's so good. You can eat it alone or with rice, but I'll usually stir fry some veggies to go with it
You gotta try smoked tofu. I basically never eat tofu but I'd gladly stuff my facehole full of that shit 10/10