Picture by picture, I will show you all the steps that are involved in making your own homemade tofu -
a traditional Chinese and Japanese food which is obtained from soy bean curd.
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By analogy with the making of milk cheese, some pleople name tofu soy cheese. However, tofu niether tastes like milk cheese, not does it share its set of issues (saturated fats). Therefore, we'd better call it simply tofu, and enjoy it for what it is: a vegetable food which is high in proteins and inexpensive, especially when you can make it at home, as our picture sequence will show you.
You could make tofu this way once a week. That will get you enough quantity for a family of four. But if that isn't enough for your appetite... just increase the recipe amounts. But do not go overboard - even though fresh tofu is much, much better than the shrink-wrapped tofu that you could buy from a store, excess is never a good choice.
| Soak overnight 18 ounces (510 grams) of dry soy beans. | Drain the beans and discard their soaking water. Soy is soaked enough when you can easily break a bean into two halves (long side), and if the surface of the half bean is shiny and flat, that is it does not curve inwards or outwards. Soaking time depends on the season (up to 24 hours in the Winter, 12 hours in the Summer - making sure that beans do not turn sour). For shorter soaking time (as low as 4 hours) boil the water, turn off the heat, pour the beans, and cover with a top. | You need a powerful blender to make a very finely grained puree. | Boil 19 cups (4.5 liters) of water to make soy milk. Dry soy to water ratio is 10 to 1. It is easier to figure it out in metric units, as follows. 500 grams of soaked water absorb 500 grams of water, or 0.5 liters. Add 4.5 liters to get 5 liters - or 5,000 grams of water for 500 grams of dry soy. That is a 10 to 1 ratio. Notice the pot size; you need a big pot to boil the soy beans because they will make a lot of froth. | Now you need to strain the soy. Put a strainer over a pot, and mosquito net over the strainer. |
| Puree the soaked, uncooked beans with a blender. The resulting compound, which is called GO, needs to be very finely grained. Adding a little bit of boiling water can help to blend the beans more easily. | Blend the beans in several small batches, then pour them all together in a big bowl. | Now pour GO into the boiling water. The Chinese method keeps GO inside the water for a short time, then it strains it, to make raw soy milk which gets cooked afterwards. This method is cleaner than the Japanese method, which makes a lot of froth by fully cooking GO. | Detail of GO strainer. | Strain GO by the ladle. The liquid you get is soy milk, which you then use to make tofu. (If you want to make a soy milk drink, start with a dry soy to water ratio of 8 to 1, follow the steps to make soy milk, then cook the liquid for at least 20 minutes with a piece of kombu). |
| Detail of the straining process. | Wrap the net around GO and squeeze out as much milk as possible. | Keep squeezing more and more... | Cook soy milk without a top for 7 minutes (Winter) or 10 minutes (Summer, when microbes are more active). Ensure milk does not stick to the bottom of the pot and burn. Let it cool down to 158-176 ºF (70-80 ºC). You are going to curdle it using NIGARI (magnesium chloride as a residual of sea salt processing). Dissolve a spoonful of nigari in a cup of hot water. | if you add too much nigari, or too quickly, tofu will becomes tough and grainy. How to pour nigari - Gently stir milk with a ladle so that it starts spinning slowly inside the pot. Pour about 1/3 nigari from 20 inches over the surface. Stop the milk from spinning with a ladle. DO NOT stir. Wait for a few minutes.:) |
| Now pour 1/3 nigari from about 10 inches over the surface, and let it sit for a few minutes. Curds should not be forming, not yet. | Pour the last 1/3 nigari from a close distance, spreading it with the ladle. Soon you should start seeing curds forming. DO NOT stir. Gently remove the curds sweeping your ladle from the border to the center of the pot. | Curdled milk and curds. | Using your ladle, remove and discard curdled milk. | One after the other, place curds in a tofu press box, which is simply a metal box with several drilled through holes. Notice the placement of mosquito net. |
| Detail of the tofu press box. | Close the box and put a light weight on top. You will keep increasing the weight as the residual curdled milk drains through. | After about 20 minutes, open the box and dip the tofu brick in cold water. This will let it cool down and harden completely. | Tofu brick in cold water. | When the brick is cold, you may cut it in small cubes. Dip the cubes in cold water. Preserve tofu dipped in cold water inside a fridge. Change the water every day. It will keep for one week. |
| Tofu cubes. | Let's go back to the residual of strained GO, which is named OKARA. It is a food of its own. It is rich in calcium, which can help contrasting osteoporosis. Okara is more difficult to digest because it contains lots of hull. So you should cook it well, using strong heat (flame) and oil, especially if you are cooking for people who can't digest beans. | Do not discard okara! Instead sauté some vegetables... | ...when the vegetables are cooked mix in okara and stir everything together for a few more minutes. |
Tofu is an excellent nourishment, as it is often the case with soy derivatives: low in fats, high in good quality proteins, calcium and other minerals that benefit our body. The firmness of tofu makes it suited for a lot of different preparations. You can boil, stew, or sauté tofu, make custards and sauces, and so on. The list of recipes is very long. If nutritional information - as in nutrition science - is your ticket, take a look at the table on the side. It was extracted from searching tofu at Wolfram Alpha. If you visit that site, I think that you will marvel - as it happened to me - at the ingenuity that peaceful human beings can attain.
Wikipedia English entry about tofu».
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