Hobbits In Rivendell

The Spicy Tofu Salad we saw the other night on “A Lyon in the Kitchen” was part of an episode in which the host, a Nathan Lyon, visited a restaurant which made its own tofu.

Man, talk about jealous (and no, not of the gleaming-pated host, but the happy man in his restaurant)! The tofu-maker had obviously had a few moments with a welder’s torch. His hand-crafted machine ground soybeans and spat out okara in one direction, and soy milk in the other, and came with big pans for draining out milk and pressing tofu curds. He used food grade calcium sulfate (gypsum), which we haven’t yet tried, and came up with a really small curd, out of which he had far less liquid to press. Apparently calcium sulfate creates a more ideal flavor in tofu as well – which will go well with our next experiments, which may our dehydrated cherry tomatoes, leeks, fresh basil and thyme, or might include making a sweet tofu studded with dried fruits and Moroccan spices! A big potential “Mmmm!”

Since our efforts have been so tasty thus far, we’ve been fiddling with the idea of getting a soymilk maker, and went so far as to wander around our local Asian supermarket to see what we could find. It was instructive, as always — candied jackfruits, fresh lychees, packaged papadums and unidentifiable (well, to me, anyway) silvery fish swimming in large tanks made shopping much like a sort of culinary field trip — but sadly, no tofu makers, just lots of rice cookers, which we already have. (No trip to the Asian market is wasted, however; we were well entertained and came home with sacks of soybeans and sticks of agar, which is dried seaweed, and which is useful in making things gel hot, so it makes soups and gravies velvety without added starch or fat.) We considered borrowing my mother’s soymilk maker, but when we dropped by (she wasn’t home), it was spread across her kitchen counter (So is it broken already, Mom? Or are you cleaning it?). It’s called a ‘soy toy’ or something, anyway, which we weren’t too sure of (Toy!? Tofu is serious, people!) so we’ve been looking and wondering how worthwhile it would be to cobble together something of our own.

Today our deliberations concluded in a draw: no soy milk maker for now, but — we’ve decided that we’re going to get …a sausage attachment to the KitchenAid. Yes, I know. Weird. But here’s the thing: the soybeans have to be soaked and ground, and what better for that than a sausage grinder/food grinder? That way we’ll save what’s left of the poor blender engine before we burn it out completely. With a finer ground bean-mass, the okara will be easier to sieve out, and more of the flavor and richness in the milk will be left. Next, we’re in the process of finding or making a metal tofu press of our own, so the whole undignified tower of cans will be a thing of the past (Um, maybe. We’ll see…). It seems to be just a metal pan with holes in it, inside a larger metal pan topped by a metal lid… it just doesn’t seem that hard to make a decent press for a larger scale operation.

It does look like we’re going to need to order food-grade calcium sulfate. I find myself oddly not eager to hop down the street to Ace for gardening gypsum for my tofu (although I seem to have no issues with going to the drugstore for Epsom salts? Maybe it’s a hardware store stigma. Such sad prejudices!). We’ll lay in a supply of muslin cloth, and voilà – we’ll be in business.

Hope springs eternal, anyway. Stay tuned for more random food adventures… As the weather is suddenly quite cool and breezy, someone’s spare time is being spent concocting scones and other things I shouldn’t be eating — but my attention is turning toward making apricot preserves with ginger and citrus, since another friend’s tree is just loaded, and they’re on vacation until August and don’t care what happens to the fruit. Also, experiments are afoot with the dried apricots and the lovely pounds of mustard seed – a spicy hot/sweet apricot mustard with champagne vinegar – lovely tasting, we hope! Stay tuned!

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Now, we hadn’t forgotten that we were going to try and really do something with tofu, but sourdough starter… sort of takes over the world when it gets going. But eventually we knew we had to make tofu again — after all, freshly ground chai-spiced soy milk and hot cocoa tastes best with fresh soy milk. We finally had a good excuse — well, another good excuse, anyway, to pull out the beans.

The other night, we put a pound of dried soybeans in to soak, and started the usual drill: beans double in size and are drained, then ground in the blender and the resulting white goopy paste is boiled in a monster pot for twenty-five minutes after its first foam appears.

(NOTE: If there’s ever any doubt about whether or not the foam has appeared…? Then it hasn’t foamed. It’s like watching what happens when you put dish detergent into the washing machine. BIG bubbles, fast.)

Normally, after this step, the okara is cooked and rises to the top. Usually, we simply take the milk off the heat, then pour it through a muslin strainer. This time, multi-tasking led us to leaving it on the stove. It grew a skin. A light went on in our brains. “Hey! We made yuba!” Yuba is a thin bean curd… skin that is sometimes fried in Chinese restaurants and served with various spices as “Buddha’s (Buddha being a vegetarian Deity.) “Mock Duck,” (recipe via The Vegan Feast Kitchen). Yuba is very high in protein — higher than either tofu or milk. Seasoned and fried or eaten with condiments, it’s quite tasty – but pretty high maintenance to make if you’re making soy milk from scratch…

So, we set aside our Yuba Quest for another day, and continued on our path. We loaded the okara on drying screens and then pondered the hot soy milk. Our original quest was to experiment our way toward something like feta. We’ve seen recipes for something like ricotta, with cashews and almond, but we wanted to create something …else.

“What if we flavored it?” one of us asked. (Who knows which one of us. Genius generally strikes anonymously.) “Well, we’ve got these dried leeks and mushrooms…” the other of us mused. The consensus of “why not?” meant that before adding coagulant, we added a quarter cup of whole, dried sage, two cups of dried leek pieces and about two cups of dried champignon mushrooms. Then we added the coagulant, poured it through the strainer (sheer polyester mesh, since with the newly organized kitchen, who knows what happened to the rest of the cheesecloth and muslin) into the molds (one a Japanese sushi mold, not really meant for tofu, but it works, and it’s beautifully made, so it gets used, and the other “mold” is a stainless steel strainer. With a dish and cans on top of it for weight Again: it works.), and we waited.

Our first fear was that the coagulant — magnesium sulfate, and truly awful, if you’ve ever had the misfortune to taste it — would alter the taste of the vegetables put into the soy milk — but since the horribly sourish-bitterness is undetectable in homemade tofu, we took our chances. Our second fear was that we should maybe have added something else — the leeks were making it look a little greenish. Maybe we should have added saffron or turmeric. Perhaps the consistency would be strange.

Well, as you can see, we worried needlessly. You can SEE what it LOOKS like. My goodness, I wish you could smell and taste it. Think of savory onions and mushrooms…

Many people are ambivalent about tofu, thinking “meh” because it is basically white, somewhat gelatinous (if it’s silken, really gelatinous), and entirely tasteless (unless it’s made from a stronger milk source and then it has a heavier soy flavor that still basically tastes like… not much). Many view the vegans and vegetarians who enjoy it as humorless (and tasteless) ascetics, but I’m here to tell you that I don’t bother eating things that don’t taste good. This. Tofu. Tastes. Good.

If we were coming up with a name for this, I would say it is ganmodoki-style — almost. Ganmodoki is a Japanese method of mixing crumbled tofu, vegetables and mountain yam (yama-imo) and forming it into patties or balls and deep frying it. Without the yams (darn) or the frying, this is close. We could simply call this ‘flavored tofu,’ or ‘vegetable tofu,’ but we’ve been calling it …quiche. I know. That name’s taken.

We ate this “raw,” and warm, straight from the press with just a little soy sauce, and it was really nice. We baked it with a smidge of olive oil, and about a teaspoon each of garlic powder, salt, curry powder, freshly ground black pepper, and smoked torula yeast, and wow — it took on subtle flavors that were unexpected. Paired with a green salad, it becomes a most satisfying egg-and-onion pie. Lightly stir fried and paired with grilled tomatoes, it’s amazingly like a breakfast bake of eggs and mushrooms. It’s an unbelievably versatile food, and now we’re wondering: why stop at tofeta? The possibilities are endless…

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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.