As a vegetarian I’ve had a lot of tofu in my life. Some of it has been very good, some of it has been very bad, but it’s hard to tell how tofu is going to be until you eat it. When I saw that SeriousEats was giving away a pair of tickets to a tofu making demonstration at En Japanese Brasserie, I was intrigued. To enter the contest you had to write a haiku about tofu, so I submitted the following “masterpiece”:

people say “tofu”
like it’s a curse or bad word
have they eaten it?

I didn’t expect to win, so I promptly forgot about it. Then late Friday night I got a congratulatory email from SeriousEats, which left me scrambling to change my work schedule and to find a second person to join me at the last minute for a class on tofu.

I’d never been to En, but I’d heard of their freshly made “scooped tofu,” served warm or chilled. I am also interested in making food from scratch, particularly something as “complicated” as tofu. The class lasted about two hours and consisted of Chef Honma showing us first how to make soy milk from scratch, and then how to use that soy milk to make tofu and yuba. The process of making soy milk leaves a solid residue called okara, which he cooked with as well. Then Chef Honma made a few different dishes with the tofu. We were able to taste everything along the way, from the beans to the tofu, which was the best part. The whole afternoon was moderated by Harris Salat, who runs the website the Japanese Food Report and knows a lot about the history of tofu.

In a nutshell: To make soy milk you soak dried soy beans in water for 12-24 hours. Then drain the beans, blend them up with a little water, and heat them up a bit with more water. Drain this and the liquid is soy milk. If you add nigari, a derivative of seawater, it will congeal into tofu. Honma has a technique of stirring the nigari only twice, very gently. The tofu produced this way is almost like a custard, very different than any other tofu I’ve ever had.

Instead of adding nigari, if you cook the soy milk over a double boiler it will form a skin on the top. You can gently peel away this skin and you have yuba. This fresh yuba is much lighter and softer than dried Chinese yuba I’ve had before.

The okara, the solid remains left over from making soy milk, were cooked with vegetables in a shitake dashi and left to chill. This was may favorite dish of the day.

You can also let the tofu drain a bit and let it firm up. Then you can cook it in different ways — Honma stewed some for us, then fried some with a coating of bonito flakes.

Tofu looks deceptively easy to make, but I’m going to try. According to Harris Salat, you can get the nigari at most of the Japanese markets around NYC, and you could even skip the step of making the soy milk from scratch as long as you find an unflavored brand in a store. Of course, that would deprive you of the okara, and I’m looking forward to cooking with that as well.

En Japanese Brasserie — 435 Hudson St

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