Tofu, which is made from soya beans, is one of the best known Japanese foods.
It is quite popular as igredient of miso-soup or healthy side dish. It has never been lacked in traditoinal Japanese diet. But even for Japanese, we do not know well how it is made.
Today I joined a specially occasion to
learn how to make “tofu” and to try to make it by ourselves
What provided to us at the beginning were only 3 items; a paper cup, a small plastic spoon and a small packet of clear liquid. That’s enough to make tofu? Let’s see…
The clear liquid, called “nigari(にがり, bittern)”, is essential ingredient as coagulant to make tofu. It contains
minerals come from sea water. To be surprising, ingredients for pure tofu are
this mineral waters and warm soy milk only
But for making high quality, yummy
tofu, it is very important to mix up these two ingredients very quickly and
evenly as soon as the liquid is poured into soy milk in a paper cup. After we
had a short lecture and demonstration how to move a spoon in a small cup by the
tofu master, we reviewed and practiced the steps several times with an empty cup,
because our chance to have soy milk is only once but no time is given to look
back how to do it.
We had to take the process very quickly
to
succed in having fine piece of tofu.
I did not have time to take photo of this
process…
I followed the instruction and took all steps without fail, maybe.
After ten minutes since warm soy milk was poured into my cup, finally it looks like and smells like tofu!
It was really very short time experience to learn how tofu is made. But it was very interesting.
Of course we tasted the
own made tofu. The warm piece of my tofu was much better than a cold
factory-made tofu that we can find at supermarkets.
Comments