Yuba production is finally flourishing.
Over a decade ago, when chef Daniel Patterson professed his love for yuba to the world, Hodo Soy’s Minh Tsai — at the time, the only producer of fresh yuba in the U.S. — was not prepared for the surge in interest that followed.
Patterson, the chef-owner of Coi, had recently returned from a trip to Japan, where he experienced yuba, also known as tofu skin. He developed a sort of obsession with the stuff. And after several failed attempts to put it on the menu at Coi, he reached out to Tsai for guidance, and later wrote about the experience in the New York Times.
“We got dozens of phone calls from chefs asking us if we could make yuba for them after that, but we didn’t even have a factory up and running at that point,” says Tsai, owner of the fastgrowing Oakland beanery. Tsai got his start selling tofu and soy milk at farmers’ markets around the Bay Area in 2004. Recognizing the interest, he carved out a small space in his factory to make yuba a couple of years later, though tofu remained his primary focus.
Fast forward a few years, and now Hodo Soy’s yuba can be found in limited quantity at grocery chains and independent supermarkets across the country, including Costco and Whole Foods. It’s also popping up more frequently on the menus of dozens of top-name restaurants, including State Bird Provisions, Single Thread, Slanted Door, Mister Jiu’s and Burma Superstar in the Bay Area. With the backing of chefs and a newly developed line of yuba products, Tsai is finally prepared to ramp up production and push yuba to the mainstream.
“I want to introduce the consumer to a tofu-based product that is vastly different in texture than what they’re used to,” Tsai says. “Unlike tofu, which has 40 to 50 years of education around it, yuba is relatively young, so we’re hoping the chefs will help us with that education part of it.”
For the uninitiated, fresh yuba is the milky, sweet and nutty skin that forms on the surface of soy milk when it’s heated. Each batch of soy milk produces about eight sheets of yuba, the first of which are the creamiest, most delicate, and the last of which are pliable and chewy.
The type of yuba that Bay Area chefs have been clamoring for, according to Tsai, is the softer form — the one he traveled all the way to Kyoto last year to learn how to perfect. It has the consistency of cheese curd, and is too delicate to be pasteurized.
“That unique texture is the one people love because it reminds us of things that we know, like custard, since it’s so rich and creamy,” says Kyle Connaughton, chef and owner of Single Thread in Healdsburg, which pulls its own yuba everyday from Hodo’s soy milk and has recently been experimenting with Tsai’s newest yuba products. “He’s really nailing it. I used yuba a lot in Japan, where the quality is really high, and Minh’s product is at that level,” Connaughton says.
In Kyoto, where generations of families have been making yuba in the same way for more than 300 years, yuba is eaten like sashimi, served straight up with a variety of condiments, or sliced into sheets that are tossed in a brothy soup. Some restaurants even sell it table side by heating a pot of thick, creamy soy milk and scooping up the layers as they form.
Here, chefs like State Bird’s Stuart Brioza are treating it like a noodle replacement, tossing it with crab butter and kimchi or guanciale and tomatoes.
“I would love making something like a crème brûlée with the silky, creamy one,” says Brioza. “To me, it’s such a thing that the more you do with it, the more you will take away from the beauty of the texture.”
As more consumers are exposed to yuba on restaurant menus, Tsai is confident that his yuba will also take off. The biggest holdup to mass production, however, is that yuba takes time. And there are few ways to automate the process. It’s also not shelf-stable, and the softest form will keep only for a few days. “Everyone has tried to figure out how to speed up this process, and the truth is that it just needs time,” Tsai says.
There’s a lot of room for growth. With very few marketing efforts outside of restaurants, Hodo Soy is churning out about 1,000 pounds of yuba per day, and growing its overall business at 50 percent year over year. Still, yuba comprises just about 10 percent of the company’s overall sales. Tsai says he’s purposefully controlling the growth at retail, with plans to ramp it up once more consumers become familiar with it.
“As more chefs start to use it, then we’ll make a greater push into retail,” Tsai says. “That’s always how we’ve grown our business. We let the chefs be our advocates.”