If you hate tofu why are you sharing your recipe for it?
Why reject the thing itself but say that you have "improved" it? ugh.
For a long time, it seemed like whenever I’d encounter tofu recipes out there on the open internet (from famed food bloggers who shall not be named but who are known for Beautiful Bowls and Grains and one thing and another) (this could be almost anyone in the year 2017 lol) the recipe would begin with this caveat:
“I don’t really like tofu”
or perhaps
“I don’t usually like tofu”
This is always appalling to me, as someone who does, in fact, like tofu quite a lot. This is also shocking to me because the pitch from these recipe writers is this “I do not like tofu, here let me tell you how to cook it.”
These recipes mostly came from white American cooking bloggers, like those focused on Healthy Food for your Family, or those focused on Fast Meals for your Family, all of which were focused on how to make tofu—presented as something alien and disgusting (hm, probably something to unpack there) palatable to your husband who Loves Meat, your children who Love Meat and Mac and Cheese, and to you, a woman who also Loves Meat, but is trying to be skinnier (for you, not for your man, and it’s really about health anyway, you are a feminist after all.) Leaving aside all of the other… stuff… I am presented with one small concern when looking at their recipe: they don’t like tofu.
I do not, in fact, wish to receive instructions on how to prepare something from a person who does not like it. I would never tell someone how to make a pecan pie, or a steak, or fennel salad, as these are foods that I do not like. The thing that makes these foods what they are… that is a thing I don’t like! For whatever reason, they do not appeal to me at all.
If I were to make a fennel salad, or a pecan pie that I liked, it would be because I had made something that denied the essence of the thing itself. For me to like fennel it must be un-fennel. For me to like pecan pie, it must reject the fundamental nature of pecan pie.
The outcome might be a good recipe, it could even be enjoyed by others, but by rejecting what the thing I dislike is, I have not created a “good” pecan pie, I have made something else. If you don’t like something it doesn’t mean that all the other versions of it out there are bad, it just means that, for whatever reason, it doesn’t work for you. Your take on it isn’t “the BEST EVER tofu recipe” it’s “TOFU UN-TOFU ENOUGH THAT I LIKED IT”
When I see a recipe writer start off with “I don’t like tofu” I can tell you a few things about the recipe without even reading it:
1. They will call for extra firm tofu (and in a way that makes it seem like extra firm tofu is rare, that they have just discovered it, and that it is not like, the most common type of tofu in most grocery stores)
2. They will further demand that you press the tofu very very hard for “at least a half an hour (or as long as possible!)”
3. The recipe will call for reduced sodium soy sauce as its primary flavoring ingredient, probably with a bit of honey tossed in (honey if they’re healthy, brown sugar if they are more about the fast-casual version of home cooking).
4. The recipe will probably advise corn starch to toss your tofu in (so it gets crispy!), but this will usually mean that they aren’t calling for “GMO-free tofu, if you can find it”
What will result after baking (these are mostly health conscious bloggers who want to bake your tofu) is a tough and chewy substance, which the recipe writer will describe as “meaty” or “hearty” and they will tell you “even my meat-loving hubby asked for seconds!” (I cannot express profoundly enough my disdain for the hubby in headnotes and recipe comments.)
And I’ll tell you the truth, I’ve made a quite a few of these recipes, because baking tofu is easy, and because I think “maybe this recipe really WILL be the best ever!” (It is not). What is great about baking tofu is that it requires 1.5 of my brain cells. But I think it’s sad to bake the tofu and to think that you’ve uncovered something amazing. Baked tofu isn’t better than other tofu, it is, in fact, worse than fried tofu (I shouldn’t say that in the headnotes to my BAKED TOFU RECIPE but whatever), it doesn’t embrace the smooth creaminess of soft tofu in the way that a braise might, and it doesn’t have the depth of flavor that you’d get from a fry-n-braise. But, baked tofu will feed you, and honestly, it can be pretty good, but it’ll never be the best.
Baked tofu is what you do when you are substituting ease and expediency for textural delight, and it’s what you do when you have a vegetable and you want to eat the vegetable but you don’t feel like making a whole other thing so you just… bake it, then then, there, you have eaten a vegetable, and tofu, and it was pretty good, but mostly it’s done and it didn’t make a mess.
Here is my baked tofu recipe, I’ll call it…
1-2-3 tofu (with kale)
Ingredients
1 block of tofu (I prefer medium firm, but regular firm is fine)
A bunch of kale
rice, that you cook
Neutral oil
123 sauce (here are two variations)
the basic
1 tbs (ish) rooster (literally… I have… forgotten what it’s called. My mind is blank. Red bottle, green cap, you know what I’m talking about) sauce
2 tbs sesame oil (you can do a mix of sesame and other oil if you don’t love sesame oil)
3 tbs soy sauce (I like Japanese shoyu best for this version, I’m sure that whatever you have on hand will work)
A different version
1 tbs of gochujang (I just stick a fork or spoon in and use what I get, measuring gochujang is hard because it is so sticky)
2 tbs sesame oil (or again, do you)
3 tbs korean soy sauce
NB: this version browns faster because of the sugar in the gochujang and soy sauce.
For both versions
If you have a rice cooker, start your rice now. Let the tofu sit on a towel and drain for a bit, if you want. Mix the sauce. Cut the tofu into whatever shape you want, I go for cubes or rectangles. Heat the oven to 400. Toss tofu in sauce. Wash and dry kale. Tear it into bite sized pieces. Get a sheet pan and oil it (if you have a LOT of kale, two sheet pans), I suggest this over parchment paper because even though it makes a mess, if you use parchment paper everything will steam, and this way it browns.
Bake tofu 15 minutes. Add kale to leftover sauce, add a bit more oil to make the sauce go further, use a neutral oil. Sprinkle with toasted sesame seeds if you have them, or coconut flakes (just adds some textural variety, you could use raw sesame seeds but they won’t toast so it’s not especially good).
Flip tofu, add the kale to the pan. Bake 10-15 more minutes, keeping an eye on it past ten minutes, as things can start to burn.
Eat.
This isn’t my favorite tofu recipe, but it’s the one that I make the most, because when I have no desire to cook, or to think, I can make this. I like it (it’s especially nice with coconut rice, that gives it a good amount of fat), and it makes decent leftovers the next day. But more than anything else, it’s a staple.