The tofu trend toppling avocado on toast
Threatening to knock avo on toast off its brunchtime throne, this veggie staple is hot stuff, writes Xanthe Clay
When Yotam Ottolenghi’s favourite miso maker turns her hand to tofu, it’s bound to cause a stir, or at least a stir-fry. That soy whisperer is Bonnie Chung, who was just 25 when she launched Miso Tasty 10 years ago. Her miso pastes are now a fridge staple, with mellow, adaptable flavours.
Tofu, though, is a different challenge. While miso is a groovy ingredient turning up in everything from barbecue steaks to caramel sauce, tofu suffers from a serious image problem – we may have salivated over Nigella’s miso ice cream, but Gordon Ramsay’s tofu chocolate dessert at his Mayfair restaurant Lucky Cat sounds far less appetising.
Yet with the seemingly unstoppable rise of the vegan diet, tofu should have been leading the charge. After all, it is the original vegan protein (made from coagulated soy milk that is either set to form silken tofu, or pressed into a solid block), eaten in China for at least 2,000 years. Surely that counts for something? But in this brave new world of meatless alt-meat, lab grown burgers, nochicken nuggets and meat analogues, tofu has been left behind. Memories of tasteless, rubbery chunks in 1990s vegetarian options are hard to shake off.
Maybe now tofu’s time has come. Tofu scramble, a surprisingly delicious vegan take on scrambled egg, is set to be the new avocado toast, popping up on some of the coolest brunch menus for the brief five minutes that restaurants were allowed to open last year.
It could be the start of the great tofu rehabilitation, if we remember that tofu has an honourable history of being made and eaten for its own sake – not as second-rate substitute. The mistake comes in trying to think it is anything other than it is – a gentle foil for whatever flavours you want to bless it with. Chef and cookbook writer Ching He Huang has a book on vegan cookery, Asian Green (Kyle Books, £20) out now, and has cooked more than her share of tofu dishes. “I don’t understand why people complain that tofu is bland,” she tells me. “Potatoes are bland – you have to inject flavour.”
Chung agrees. Born and bred in Sheffield, she grew up helping in her parents’ Chinese restaurant, and worked briefly in the City before returning to her first love, cookery. “At home, we’d always have tofu on the table, a meat, a fish and a vegetable dish. So it wasn’t seen as a vegetarian dish, nor a replacement for anything, but a dish in its own right. It might have small amounts of meat in as well: that works so well, taking on all the meaty flavours.”
Chung puts great emphasis on the care taken to get the Miso Tasty tofu texture right. There’s a firm and a softer, more open textured one because, she explains, “if you want tofu to take on flavour, you need to choose a more porous tofu. So for soups and curries, where it simmers gently in sauce, softer tofu is better.
“With very firm tofu, it’s great for moving around the pan without breaking, so perfect for stir fries. But a sauce will coat it rather than absorb in. Focus on a spicy, punchy-flavoured sauce as the contrast of spice on the outside and creamy and calming on the inside can be really good.”
Sounds like exactly what we need right now: stirring stuff.