A few words on tofu. It’s not meat. It doesn’t taste like meat. Nothing you do will make it taste like meat. It’s tofu. 🙂

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s move on. To enjoy it, you must do two things: alter its texture – either by freezing it or pressing it – and marinate it. Freezing tofu makes it quite dense and a little chewy. Try it. Either you’ll like it or you won’t, and then you’ll know. Just drop the whole container in the freezer. Like anything else, you’ll need to pull it out and let it thaw before you use it. Pat it dry, dice or slice, and marinate. For more information on the freezing method, check out https://garlicdelight.com/how-to-freeze-tofu/.

Pressing tofu is easier. It reduces the water content, making it easier for the tofu to suck up marinade and giving it a slightly firmer chew. To press, you need to put the tofu in or on something to catch the water, like a plate or a towel, and something heavy on top like a book or a cast iron pan. OR you can buy a tofu press. I did this the old fashioned way for twenty years, because it was “perfectly good,” and I didn’t feel like buying another single-use gadget I’d have to find space for. It looked something like this:

The problem is, doing that way often ends up looking like this:

The heavy item slides off, scares the dog, and chaos ensues. Finally, having reached the conclusion that life is short, I made the leap and bought a tofu press. I got this little number from Tofuture.

You just drop the tofu in, smush the top down, and attach it to the sides with the tight bands. You then pop it back in the fridge and perfectly pressed tofu awaits after thirty minutes or so. There are a lot of tofu presses on the market. I like this one a lot. (Although in retrospect I wish it wasn’t so much plastic. There are presses made of bamboo as well, if you share my discomfort with plastic.) If you don’t eat tofu very often YET, don’t bother getting one of these. But if you eat it, say, twice a month or more, I recommend investing in one of these doodads. It’s just so much less bother, and you just might up eating tofu more often.

Okay, tofu buying tips. If you are going to use tofu for basic eating purposes, get extra-firm tofu, the kind in the refrigerated section that floats in a container of water. (When you get advanced and are including tofu as a blended ingredient in things, we can talk more.) Most places have several brands, and they are all fine. The packages range in size from 14-16 oz. Whole Foods brand, for example, is 14. Sprouts is 16. While most recipes tend to suggest that one pound of tofu feeds four people, I think most reasonable adults find that laughable. I think it feeds two, but you be the judge.

Which brings me to my last suggestion. In my humble opinion, tofu is not generally successful as “steaks” or “cutlets” or any other manner in which a slab of tofu is served on its own. Tofu works best in cubes as a component of something else: tossed with rice, jumbled in a salad, swimming in soup.

The best suggestion for cooking tofu I have seen recently appears here, https://inquiringchef.com/sweet-thai-chili-baked-tofu/, where the author suggests tossing your cubes of marinated tofu with corn starch and letting it sit for five minutes before baking. I have been doing this ever since I saw it, and the coating on my tofu has been divine each time.

Questions or comments? Feel free to weigh in as usual.

Note: I did not receive any form of compensation as a result of mentioning products or links in this post.