Tofu

I have recently been in the grip of a tofu making obsession. Until a few weeks ago I had never actually cooked tofu myself. I had always loved the silky little slips of it you get in miso soup but that was just about as far as my knowledge went. In fact, when I wanted to cook an Ottolenghi ‘Black Pepper Tofu’ recipe from Plenty I chose to do it with chicken. And FYI, that recipe, if you ever do it, firstly takes HOURS of prep and secondly is one of the most frighteningly spicy things I have ever created. The recipe calls for 8 chillies, but that’s nothing compared to adding 5 tablespoons of crushed black pepper. I was scraping my bleeding tongue in agony.

Anyway, I was keen to redo the Ottolenghi recipe with less pepper and this time with tofu and the result was truly delicious. The soft, blandness of the tofu set off the piquant, sparkly Asian flavours of the sauce perfectly. So this started me along a dangerously long road of research about tofu production. Home-made tofu is virtually unheard of in the UK. There seems to be a very small number of people in the US who make it themselves, and although their advice online is useful for research, it’s not particularly helpful in terms of getting hold of the stuff you need. The line up for equipment looks something like this:

A huge pot (or two big ones)

A cooking thermometer

A fine sieve

Muslin

Blender

A tofu press

Soy beans

Nigari (magnesium chloride)

And here’s a great video explaining what to do, made by a strangely compelling lady. I could watch her for hours (and I did). 

All a bit faffy. But most of the work seems to be associated with extracting the milk from the beans so I thought, in me old brain, that I would just buy some soya milk and start from there. One other hitch though was that despite two hours of googling I could not find a single retailer, online or in London, that sells nigari (the coagulant) at a reasonable price. This place seems alright (£3.58 for a kilo): http://www.naturallygoodfood.co.uk but their postage is £5.60. Maybe I’m tight but I didn’t really want to spend that much on a little bag of salt. I read online that an acceptable alternative to nigari is Epsom salt which can be bought at most chemists. So I went along to the pharmacy and duly got some. My equipment list now looked like this:

One saucepan

One tea-towel

1 litre cartoon of Alpro Soya Milk

Pot of Epsom Salts

Tupperware with holes stabbed through the bottom in place of a tofu press

I put the litre of milk in a pan and heated it for 5 minutes until it was steaming but not boiling. I mixed 2 teaspoons of Epsom salts into a little glass of water and added that. It started to coagulate immediately which was quite exciting but then nothing more happened. 

I added another glass of Epsom salt water and nothing. I heated it up a bit, I stirred it, I left it, but I could not get bigger curds to form. I then added yet another cup of Epsom mixture but I couldn’t get it to separate further and by that time I had probably added dangerous levels of salt to the mixture. Undeterred I poured it into my tea-towel-lined hole-riddled tupperware and let the liquid drain.

I should just mention that is process was utterly un-cost-effective since the milk cost £2. It was still incredibly faffy and without the satisfaction of engaging in a process likely to produce results.

And the verdict: absolutely inedible. The bf, who bravely tasted it, was shuddering with the memory of the flavour for some time. I’m afraid I am having to document an out-and-out failure. It seems to take about 5 hours to make tofu from soy beans and my conclusion, I am sorry to say, is that it’simply not worth it.