Ralph Lauren: We are responsible
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The LA Times has an article about making tofu at home that is "exponentially better than any store-bought blocks of tofu" with soy milk and nigari brine.
This is [Sona restaurant chef de cuisine Kuniko Yagi's] recipe for making tofu from soy milk, and it's the one Yagi uses: Add a teaspoon of liquid nigari to 500 milliliters of cold soy milk and stir. Then pour it into heat-proof bowls and cook (in a water bath or steamer) until it sets like custard. That is it. There's no heating the soy milk to bring it to a certain temperature before adding the nigari. No separating liquids from solids. No straining once it's cooked.Do-it-yourself fresh tofuKariya had figured just the right amount of soy milk (which he makes -- so he knows that the brix, or percentage of dissolved solids, is 14%) to use with a certain amount of nigari (which he imports from Japan and has magnesium chloride and other trace minerals), so that his tofu recipe works consistently. He sells both the milk ($3.50 for a half-gallon) and the nigari, which isn't cheap but will make a lot of tofu and will last almost indefinitely ($25 for a pint).
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I just had dinner last weekend at Cyrus in Healdsburg, CA, and as part of their vegetarian tasting menu they offer tofu made table side. There was no cooking it in a water bath. They simply poured hot liquid from what looked like a tea pot into a glass serving dish with a lid. The server placed the lid on top and told us to let it sit for 5 minutes. Once the time was up we removed the lid and were treated to the best tasting fresh tofu we had ever had.
there's nothing like fresh tofu...
growing up in rural Canada, my dad had tofu making equipment shipped from Japan (circa 1980) and was even mentioned in The Book of Tofu by William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi, which introduced tofu to a western audience.
i didn't have such amazingly fresh tofu until many years later, in Kyoto, where I was lucky enough to find a small tofu shop with the most incredible tofu I've ever eaten.
What on earth does "exponentially better" mean? That the betterness between it and normal tofu doubles once per hour?
And what if the exponent is negative?
Home-made tofu is teh awsum. My wife bought a tofu-making machine and we make our own.
It's very easy to do with a machine and takes about half an hour (after the beans are soaked, that takes 8 hours).
We think the taste and texture are way better than any store-bought tofu, but that's us... YMMV.
The bible-as mentioned above by Zackly-still a great resource like 30 years after original publication:
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Tofu-William-Shurtleff/dp/0345351819/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246053256&sr=1-1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QNGPmuqa6s
I had been conditioned for years and years to the standard, store-bought tofu and thought all were more or less alike.
However, I recently discovered Sol Cuisine Certified Organic Firm tofu which is produced in Mississauga, so it's practically local for any Torontonians, and is leaps and bound better in taste and texture than any tofu I've known!
I have been vegan or vegetarian since late 1996 and have consumed a lot of soy protein in that time, and have never noticed a shortage of male hormone! At least perceptibly, perhaps it has prevented me from gaining big muscles, but all other functions remains above and beyond... if anything, helping your body eliminate excess testosterone is a good thing to reduce aggression and (afaik) helps prevent prostate cancer (effects upon babies in utero with their delicate hormonal balance could be far different).
Er, brix is a measure of sugar in solution, not dissolved solids...but fresh tofu is delish regardless.
Much cheaper to buy your own beans and use a soymilk maker (about $100) to make the milk, then coagulate. Store-bought soymilk isn't cheap. You also don't need to buy overpriced nigari--you can use epsom salts or clean seawater to coagulate the soymilk.
Hiteque- if you're nervous about hormones, I hope you realize that milk and meat contain a lot of real hormones (much more of a concern than weakly little phytoestrogens).
Not to mention that phytoestrogens can block the reception of estrogen, which (thanks to many women on birth control) is now in the water supply- so they can actually protect you from environmental sources of estrogen.
Anyways, I make my own soymilk & tofu and they are both much cheaper and much tastier than store brands :)
Any sour liquid can be used as a coagulator, for example lemon juice or vinegar. You get a slightly different tofu then with salts, but it's really, really good. You can also make cheese (panir) with cows milk and a sour liquid with the same procedure.
Tofu milk is dead simple to make: Soak-Mash-Cook-Strain. I fail to see the purpose of a special soymilk-maker taking up space in my kitchen, but I never used one. Whats wrong with a blender?
I never measure and I have yet to fail making tofu, don't make it sound like it's complicated when it isn't. I hate when people try too make simple kitchen work sound complicated.
Tips: Freeze the tofu to make it chewy and "meaty". The solids (okara) left from making the soy milk has the right consistency to be used as a meat surrogate in Spaghetti alla Bolognese or a lasagna, but they don't taste much.
There's a nice Japanese restaurant on Broadway at 30th Street in Astoria (Queens, New York) called Linn. They also do tableside fresh tofu and it's lovely.
-Sumana Harihareswara
HITEQUE - don't drink beer than, there's worse in that.