Soup Noodles

It has taken me a long time to understand tofu.

For a long time, I thought of tofu as a sort of health food, eaten by those whose healthy eating obsession loomed larger in their lives than their ignored, despised, insensate palates. That didn’t interest me, so I didn’t get around to tasting any tofu for many years. When I came to understand that tofu is a common ingredient in Chinese food, I had to reconsider. So I did the worst thing one could possibly do, if the goal is to get on familiar terms with tofu: I brought home a big, pale block of the stuff from the supermarket (extra firm, please, to make it as un-gross as possible), sliced off a chunk, gritted my teeth, and took a taste.

Well. One might as well try to understand mayonaisse by eating a spoonful. It wasn’t disgusting, exactly, but it sure didn’t seem like food. A vaguely cheeselike texture, and…nothing much in the way of flavor, pretty bland, and what flavor there was, was sort of bitter and cheesy. Why eat the stuff at all, unless you’re desperate?

A lot of time has passed since then, and a lot of taste experiences. I started to tolerate tofu — those slippery, elusive, ethereal bits in a Japanese miso soup, that would disintegrate if I wasn’t very delicate with my chopsticks; firm strips of tofu in a stir-fry or in a hot and sour soup. And, best of all perhaps, strips or slices of tofu in a Chinese hot pot, slowly absorbing subtle flavors from the sauce as the dish bubbled away, its smoothness complemented by the starchy savory glycerininess of the sauce.

And, more recently, I’ve crossed over and become a serious tofu fan, which emphatically does not mean that I have any more desire than I ever did, to eat the stuff plain. I came, I think, to understand what tofu really is to Chinese cuisine — it’s a texture food, and one that absorbs flavors. Somehow, once I had tofu neatly categorized with the tree ear mushrooms, the snow fungus, the shark’s fin and other special Chinese cuisine texture experiences, it became a treat.

It was the hot pots that did it, mostly. But there were two special dishes that put me over the top. One was a cold dish of tofu, century eggs, and pickled mustard greens, from Wu Kong Shanghai Restaurant in Hong Kong. A simple but brilliant dish, pairing two strong flavors that would have been overwhelming on their own, with the light delicate texture and bulk of tofu.

The second special tofu dish, I’ll talk about in my next post. And I’ll give the recipe for the best version of it that I’ve ever had.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 at 7:01 pm and is filed under Chinese Cooking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.