America doesn't know tofu
asteriskmag.com
asteriskmag.com
The other is that the author makes the mistake of over emphasizing the vegetarianism aspect (which i think some comments here also are). Many chinese dishes with tofu flavor them with meat. Outside of a temple, the vegetarian aspect isnt really important, tofu is just another dish. Tofus attachment with being a meat replacement or a vegetarian food is the major reason its not eaten more by americans.
I have some stuff in boxes that live in the panty next to the rest of my beans and just use it whenever.
As a Japanese, I was surprised that Tofu is almost always treated as a meat alternative in the US, even in many Chinese restaurants. Where is Mapo-tofu :face-with-rolling-eyes:
But I would consider the tofu-as-meat-alternative "marking" a success, given the massive adoption compared to other Asian ingredients which are pushed to the small Asian corner of the grocery stores.
That has always been my impression.
And if you get any sort of processed food (nuggets, sausages, etc.), the fake meats are way more expensive than the real stuff :(
I have a number of vegetarian tofu recipes I like but... my favorite Ma Po tofu recipes (there are innumerable versions) have meat in them.
I really dislike how common, ancient foodstuffs get tilted into ideological pigeonholes. There's a galaxy of vegetarian Chinese dishes, of which tofu is just one component. I've started to learn about Asian pickles and oh dear how deep it goes. Just fantastic, and delicious!
Anyway it never occurred to me that people shy away from tofu because it's vegetarian; people cook with eg beans and vegetables, right? I always thought it was because hardly anyone cooks traditional Chinese dishes at home. I didn't do it much myself until I discovered Fuschia Dunlop.
What's that? A purple tire? A recipe?
She's a British author and cook who has written extensively about Chinese cooking.
What you will probably have a problem with is getting the more exotic ingredients. I could not find some things in Ranch 99 markets, and now that I live in the Atlanta area it's quite a bit harder. Fortunately quite a few items are available on Amazon.
The book also has a good section on ingredients and techniques. Many of the recipes are available in her other books (all worthwhile, Fuchsia is my hero), but sometimes slightly simplified here for accessibility and speed.
Anyway, dinner is meat, and dessert is this: take one part 65% chocolate chips, melt in microwave[1], add to equal weight silk tofu in bowl of 12 c food processor, whir until combined, spoon into oreo cookie crust, refrigerate 6 hours or overnight. You might never make mousse again. I mean, mousse is better, but it's also 20x fussier. Want some deeper flavor? Add 1 tsp coffee powder, 1 tsp vanilla to the choc/tofu before whir, or lighten[2] with a few tbsp heavy cream.
I've got friends who can't boil water, and I taught 'em this recipe, and to this day it's their best dessert they know how to make. I'm a little proud of the simple recipes like that.
[1] Do you know how to melt chocolate in the nuker without scorching it? Look that up first.
[2] Yes, lighten! The cream catches more air, lifts up the "tofousse" a bit. If you like it even more puffy, add a tub of dairy whip topping, but this makes for a floppy pie when sliced unless you add gelatin.
Tragically, another great ingredient, Famous Chocolate Wafers, was discontinued this year . . icebox cake lovers are still recovering.
https://www.southernliving.com/discontinued-nabisco-famous-w...
Saying you're "making tofu for dinner" would be interpreted as a vegan/vegetarian dogwhistle by most rural Americans, rightfully so. I've made many dishes with tofu and meat for rural friends and family (without mentioning tofu at all), and they loved it, to the point of asking me where to buy it for their own dishes.
That seems like a pretty broad generation. Are you sure it's true?
The "20 kinds of tofu" you can get in any Chinese grocery stores are often slightly changed variants (i.e. silk, soft, firm, hard tofu are pretty similar), and usually poor in quality.
He did not exaggerate the vegetarianism aspect as well, if you visit Temples in China, affiliated / non-affiliated restaurants nearby boasts "vegetarian feast" aka "全素斋" , some even name it a culture as "素斋文化". They make Tofu taste like meat and looks like meat, it is definitely a big thing and you could search for photos on how close these food look like real meat/fish and the popularity.
Are you sure?
I’m pretty sure you can get all but the Jianshui one (I actually don’t know what this is) at 99 Ranch in San Jose.
The catch is that someone might not know what these various tofus are if they don’t know what they look like uncut and/or they don’t read Chinese.
> The "20 kinds of tofu" you can get in any Chinese grocery stores are often slightly changed variants (i.e. silk, soft, firm, hard tofu are pretty similar)
This is definitely not true at 99 Ranch. There are way more than that.
>I’m pretty sure you can get all but the Jianshui one (I actually don’t know what this is) at 99 Ranch in San Jose.
You make a good point. My friend from San Jose always describes himself as being from the Seattle area. Sometimes he calls San Jose “Shoreline Washington” (apparently something locals say)
That is not tofu, though, that is mock-meat, mock-fish, mock-chicken etc made entirely out of gluten and is highly processed.
Mock-whatever does, indeed, have the texture of and is flavoured according to what it «mocks». Tofu, on the other hand, can't be substantially textured, hence the choice of gluten.
The author is specifically writing from a vegetarian/vegan perspective, as noted in the article:
> I was now here on the pretense of “study abroad,” but really just crisscrossing the country to find foods that would excite me and other would-be vegans back in Los Angeles. I had to learn about the tofu dumpling of love.
Emphasis mine.
Many times when we say fish-flavored dish, for Chinese it means we cook it the same way as fish, use the spices we use to cook fish. The same goes with tofu. Chinese dishes are strong in spices, the flavor mostly comes from spices, and those flavor connects to your brain, that's how you can make a vegetarian dish taste like a meat dish, with the correct texture and flavor.
Although vegetarian is not a big thing in China, we do eat a lot vegetables, it is a must to have vegetables for every meal.
> It’s nice to meet you. I’m working on promoting Chinese tofus in the States. If you’re not familiar, China has over 20 types of tofus. They taste nothing like conventional white blocks. Some are bready. Others taste like aged cheese. Some bake up like pastry crust. Others melt.
> I’m writing a book to teach western cooks how use these ingredients beyond Chinese cooking. I’m also building a team to import and sell these ingredients to western supermarkets. If you’re excited about this project, let me know here. I’d love to find ways to collab.
That (I thought) it didn't melt was the one thing holding it back from being a true vegan cheese[0] alternative to me.
[0] Process for making {cheese, tofu}: take {milk, soy milk}, add some acid to make the proteins coagulate, then draw the rest of the owl to get your sliceable high-protein block of controllable firmness and flavour.
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/302277589
To me, a true vegan cheese alternative has to tick all the boxes that cheese ticks at the same time, not a separate product for each box you want to tick.
I'm only going to accept vegan cheese as a full substitute for real cheese when it ticks enough boxes, and one of those boxes is the nutritional values (the others include flavour and how it behaves when cooked, including melting vs. browning).
That's why I specifically noted that I'm interested by the prospect of melty tofu, as tofu is the closest substitute I have right now on the nutritional value.
Maize, rice, potatoes, and wheat have more than you might expect given they're more famous as carbs. Wheat can be processed to extract the gluten, which is a protein, which you may also know by the name "seitan".
So what I do in practice when I want a vegan sandwich is a thin-ish slice of smoked tofu[0] instead of vegan cheese, before adding lettuce or cucumber or whatever.
When I want a vegan pizza, however, this particular tofu isn't very melty. It tastes great even cold, like cheese, but no melt.
Most days I'm only eating vegetarian, not vegan, but if I can get a good melty tofu that fits in a similar gap for both diet and flavour even as a simple topping (let alone as a more complex part of the recipe as in, say, quiche) then that makes it easier to eat vegan on more days.
[0] https://shop.rewe.de/p/rewe-bio-vegan-raeucher-tofu-2x175g/8...
I wonder if anyone's tried adding lactose to soy milk and using cultures and rest of the process as if to target a particular traditional cheese.
I'm not saying the result would be vegan, I don't know if there's a vegan source or way of manufacturing lactose, but just for interest.
Most cheese is not made with acid but with enzyme called rennet, which is typically found in stomachs of cow's for example. Now, there is synthetic rennet which is used in the cheese industry widely, which is vegan. However, rennet doens't work with plant-based milks. We've done a lot of experiments to find a replacement enzyme for rennet that would coagulate soy milk with a similar result as animal-based cheese, but didn't get any great results.
The cheeses made with acid are usually softer (e.g. ricotta). For a while we manufactured and sold a plant-based cheese made with soy milk that was very similar to ricotta. Not bad, but a far cry from the animal-based version.
I still think it's possible to find a way to make plant-based cheese without needing to synthetically create vegan casein. As other commenters have mentioned, many of the vegan cheeses currently available are based on either coconut oil, cashew, or almonds (or a mix of these). For some use cases, this works suprisingly well (e.g. if you live in Germany, get the vegan Feta from Edeka's own brand. It's the fucking best). But then again for some use cases, they don't (e.g. the melting behavior is usually not very good). I think they've gotten a lot better in the past 5 years and I don't miss animal-based cheese anymore as a vegan. I also think there's a local maximum here with these coconut oil, almond and cashew based cheeses though.
Edit: Confused lactose with casein, updated to reflect that
Lucali's in Brooklyn, New York is using it for their vegan pizza. Are they doing some crazy food science / chemistry?
Water, Coconut Oil, Potato Starch, Tapioca Starch, Soymilk Powder, Kappa Carrageenan, Calcium Phosphate, Vegetable Color, Salt, Pea Starch, Natural Flavor, Lactic Acid.
It looks like no "crazy" food science is involved. Like many other vegan cheeses, it's primarily based on coconot oil (fun fact: ingredients in ingredient lists must be ordered from largest percentage of weight to lowest).
Have you tried it? Is it good?
It doesn't "melt" in the sense that it softens and becomes stringy when heated (eg. Mozzarella), but you can "dissolve" this kind of tofu in water, or at least you can make it a sauce-like consistency by adding water.
It has vaguely cheese-like flavor, more akin to the softer, ripened cheeses or the blue cheeses, but not so much the harder cheeses like cheddar.
Should be widely available, try it some time. Usually it's not directly eaten, but more of a condiment or for adding flavor to a dish in a similar way as soy sauce.
tofu isn't green?? welp, my life is a lie
Why? American farmers are great at growing soybeans. They even grow varieties that are exported to Asia specifically for making tofu.
There's an old story about when Honda first set up factories in Ohio, they still shipped the engines from Japan. After a while they got tired of returning the containers back empty, and went in search of something they could fill them with. In the end, they hired local farmers to grow specific soybeans that were desired in Japan - every engine crate from then on returned to Japan with those beans inside.
Just as with those Honda engines, it's easier to start by rerouting some of the output of an existing factory than having to stand up a whole new factory from scratch.
It might very well turn out that for most of these regional specialty tofus, there's not enough demand in America to make local production economically viable, but there could still be a niche for a specialized tofu importer that can provide small quantities of many different varieties.
Asian style:
- (Seattle) Northwest Tofu: https://maps.app.goo.gl/omGVAsunK79BH1SYA
- (Cupertino, CA) Sogo Tofu: https://sogotofu.business.site/
American/fusion style:
- (Arcata, CA) Tofu Shop: https://www.tofushop.com/
- (Chicago) Phoenix Bean: https://www.phoenixbean.com/products.html
- (Nationwide) Nasoya: https://www.nasoya.com/about-us/
- (Nationwide) Wildwood: https://wildwoodfoods.com/
- (Nationwide) Hodo: https://www.hodofoods.com/
Wholesale distributors of fake meats:
- (San Jose, CA) Ecovegan: https://ecovegan.com/
- (NYC) Lily's Vegan (former May Wah): https://www.lilysveganpantry.com
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IMO Sogo Tofu and Northwest are worth going out of your way to try out if you're ever in the Bay Area or Seattle. They're just wonderful.
One of the problems is that, like so many things in America, tofu has taken on some silly political baggage. Among a significant share of the population, both conservative and health oriented, there is a common belief that soy is full of extrogen that will, if ingested, reduce masculine characteristics and emphasize feminine characteristics. The reality is that the phytoestrogens in soy do not have a significant effect on humans and we have an extremely large amount of data including the massive "China Study" that shows that. But the idea has taken hold and now many people are afraid to eat tofu because it will turn them into weak and unhealthy girls.
More to the point, I've never seen a single soyjak meme that was targeted at Asian people. It's not about Asian people. It's about a specific type of white person.
No shit. The person you're responding to wasn't even remotely suggesting this. ;P
Their entire point is that by acting as if soy is this problematic ingredient, but failing to acknowledge that entire nations consume it without problems, is inherently racism-tinged/backed. It has always been an attempt to decry non-meat-eating as effeminate by attempting to attribute a poorly drawn study from well over a decade ago that people seemingly barely read through.
Furthermore the premise of soybeans being feminizing, the claim made up thread that prompted this sub-discussion, is a 21st century meme that cannot possibly explain why 18th, 19th and 20th century farmers in North America grew soybeans for their livestock but not themselves. Nor is the reason for this because they hated Asian people, the reason is because they were never well exposed to Asian culture in the first place. Even if you want to blame that on the Chinese Exclusion Act (at the end of the 19th century) and therefore racism, the production of soybeans for animal feed was already established generations earlier. The large expanse of the Pacific Ocean and the slow permeation of culture prior to the information age has more to do with it that anything else.
We're talking about an era in which North American coastal communities thought lobster was a shitty food despite Mediterranean Europeans knowing it to be delicious since at least the Roman era. Food culture didn't travel fast, it took people several generations to figure out foods new to them even when those foods were well understood by people who looked like them and with whom they had relatively high cultural exchange.
No, it has been around for longer than that. Soylent is a tertiary at best aspect to this.
Regardless of which particularly product prompted this, the point is the meme is new but westerners not eating soy is not new and cannot be attributed to the meme, nor is the meme even about asians. The memes mocked white guys in the west who eat soy products, particularly soylent. As for the general aversion to eating soybeans, read the Wikipedia page for soy. It has a short history of soy consumption in North America since the introduction of the beans here in the 18th century. For most of their history in North America they were raised almost exclusively as animal feed. This wasn't because of a meme that didn't then exist, nor because anti-asian racism; it simply wasn't considered very good to eat. America got the bean itself from Asia but not the culture of tofu production and consumption. In the 20th century methods of processing soybeans for human consumption started to be developed in North America, but it would take several decades to gain any appreciable traction.
The "soybeans are effeminizing" train of thought only came about very recently in response to soybeans actually being consumed now in North America. The memes about "soyboys" exclusively featured white men who were usually skinny or skinny-fat, office workers who lacked physical strength, not laborers, usually with thick-rimmed glasses and an enthusiasm for immature interests like video games or saturday morning cartoons. The memes were about these sort of white men, not about Asians.
Tldr: these memes weren't about Asians and neither were they the reason it took so long for soybeans to catch on. That's completely ahistorical, wrong by centuries.
In my experience hardcore competitive bodybuilding culture in particular does not cross over with 4chan very much. The users of 4chan tend to be too young to have entered to competitive bodybuilding scene so the generations are different, plus there are other cultural issues. Putting time into 4chan and time into the gym are not obviously exclusive of each other but in practice end up being so.
It certainly seems that the soy-estrogen theory became widely accepted “bro science” somehow; I just don’t know of any evidence that it was in any way related to anti-Asian racism.
I actually run an imageboard myself. Btw, if anyone from 13chan is reading this, the solution to the challenge is "im_from_13chan_that_means_im_cute"
I love 13chan <3
I have a great love for tofu as well, ever since I dropped meat a few years ago. I am glad to see that there are people like George Stiffman that seem to evangelize non-meat dishes and ingredients like tofu.
It has the umami quality certain meats & cheeses have, you just need to have another bite, that I've not have had with other meat replacements.
I've eaten the most delicious vegetarian chicken made of Seitan over a decade ago in a monastery in Xiamen.
Still not sure why it hasn't made it's way to the West. Maybe because of the fact its basically pure gluten.
No marketing, but an example: https://www.korodrogerie.de/bio-seitan-400-g
So if you are gluten free and vegan, it's tough.
And you have to be careful because you can't just grab some vegan product and think it is safe. Thus tofu is my go-to for protein.
It doesn't mean tofu doesn't stand on its own but that "of things people use to replace meat in their diets with intention" tofu is the most popular.
If you want something prepared Asian/Buddhist style, 99 Ranch or a similar Asian store should have that. You can also get similar things online from Lily's Vegan Pantry (formerly May Wah): https://www.lilysveganpantry.com/Vegan_Chicken_s/1516.htm
I think the US is so meat-centric that seitan (for those who even know what it is) and tofu/soy are commonly seen as some sort of weirdo/hippy/vegan/activist food. I suspect the reason 90% of people who arrive at seitan who aren’t involved in a cultural that already eats it are arriving there because they went looking for a meat replacement, not just for an addendum to their American diet.
Surprisingly not bad in a lot of dishes.
I only see that term used in India. Is it used elsewhere?
One trick I've learned is when frying tofu, let it sit until you're pretty sure it's burned. Then wait at least that long again before flipping it and starting the process over. (It's really, really hard to burn tofu.)
Other tricks include putting it in the freezer before cooking it or microwaving it for 30 seconds before fully cooking. Both of these help to remove water from the tofu, making it firmer and easier to work with.
Tofu will pick up the flavors of whatever it's cooked with, so it's great for adding to dishes with sauces or marinades!
I typically buy the extra firm variety for stir-fry, and I'll cut a corner off the package and press out the water before dicing it. I'll have to try the microwave trick next time. The "burn it" advice is on point. You really have to boil out the water before it really starts cooking.
This gets you tasty tofu with a crust, full of roasted aromas, and takes only 30 minutes total!
Plus, even in areas where Stinky Tofu is common, it's divisive. When I was in Taiwan, only about half of the people I talked to liked it. The other half wouldn't touch it.
My current favorite is the 'Made with Lau' channel. A retired Cantonese chef who teaches the techniques he mastered over the years in his restaurant in the US. Start with his oldest uploaded videos for the good stuff. https://www.youtube.com/@MadeWithLau
This stuff just takes time. I remember reading a news article where someone talked about drinking bubble tea in NYC before it was popular as a kid, as a treat. Now you can get bubble tea everywhere
One of the articles in that same issue was the one that pushed me to finally become vegetarian.
*bottom article on the front page: "Rarely is the Question Asked: Is Our Children Learning?" should be "are our children learning".
ps what is the article that convinced you to go vegatarian, sounds interesting
Snow_Falls is so contemptuous of Asterisk that he sees a blatant 'error' which 'somehow' evaded the writers and editors all this time, and assumes that this means they are that incompetent; he doesn't consider the modus tollens, that the error is deliberate and he is the one failing to understand what is a well-known GWB allusion. If he had a higher opinion of Asterisk, he might have instead checked (if he took even a second to google the title "Rarely is the Question Asked: Is Our Children Learning?", the first 5 hits all explain the allusion), or at least withheld judgment - but he didn't, so he just snarks here and gets to be embarrassed when someone politely explains the joke to him.
This happens all the time in places with 'context collapse', especially on Twitter - I don't know how many times I've seen someone retweet something 'stupid' or 'obviously wrong', where actually the original tweet was a pretty amusing reference that the retweeter didn't get. (For example, if someone tweets something along the lines of 'They spent $X, for that much money, they could have given every American $Y million dollars!', others might get angry about the arithmetic being wildly wrong by multiple orders of magnitude, thereby demonstrating utter innumeracy... Because the original tweeter is making fun of a famous instance of innumeracy.) It is a particularly infuriating kind of criticism because it often is done in bad faith, due to contempt and laziness and assuming the worst possible interpretation of something one has written with great effort, and it is especially irritating to be condescended to by someone who is so ignorant compared to you that they don't even realize their ignorance.
It's a pity because it makes it hard to write publicly in any way but the most boring way for the lowest common denominator, given that inevitably someone is going to come along and take your Socratic ignorance for genuine ignorance, or your playful misspelling as proof you can't even run a spellchecker, etc, and you can hardly explain every joke without vitiating them.
You don't outright call me acting in bad faith, but you sure imply it. I am not embarrased at all, though I am grateful for the other commenter explaining the very nation-specific joke.
edit: I checked the video, it's thirteen years old! I wouldn't even expect an american to remember that.
I don't think you were being contemptuous, exactly, but I do think the train of thought you were describing is one often found on Hacker News, that boils down to "stop at the first problem I see and declare the rest is probably not worth considering". Maybe that process works well for filtering out things you don't want to spend attention on, but it's going to have false positives, and maybe it's a little grating when you confidently present one of these false positives as a rebuttal to other people praising the overall quality of the writing.
(See also: that guy in this thread who got flagged for replying "Do they claim to?" implying they only engaged far enough to read the headline and come up with a sarcastic reply.)
Which article was it?
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/making-sense-of-moral-chan...
> C: It doesn’t require a great deal of moral or ethical insight to see that treating a human being as a thing, not a person, is wrong. Just about every sort of spiritual, ethical or moral system has described slavery in one form or another as “against nature.”
> But historically, people also thought of slavery as a product of civilization and therefore found ways to justify it. They created ways to explain, for example, why specific groups of people should be enslaved, or why a particular system of slavery is justified, even a form of progress over a previous system.
> I’ve always thought that the best analogy is how we regard eating meat. [...] We also know that eating animals is unethical. We’re doing something cruel and unnecessary. But we do it because that’s just what we do. It wouldn’t be surprising to me if 30, 50 or 120 years from now, people look back on this time period and ask, “What was wrong with these people? They must have been like moral infants. They must not have realized this is a cruel way to treat animals.” But we know it perfectly well. It’s just what we do.
> A: I don’t eat pork or chicken for animal welfare reasons. And the line of thinking that convinced me to actually do this was that if I was alive in the 18th century, I’d want to be the kind of person who’s boycotting sugar.
That line of thinking convinced me too.
Another thing is availability. Grocery hypermarts like Whole Foods are embarrassing monocultures that lack diversity. Hell, they don't even sell basic pita bread of any kind at their flagship store in downtown Austin. WF maybe a bad example because many shoppers are more often about conspicuous consumption rather than quality, diversity, or choice and it's run by a ruthless corporation that only cares about maximizing profitability per shelf area.
While Trader Joe's (Aldi Nord) at least sells pita bread, they also don't carry the variety of Asian-store-like SKUs of different forms of tofu, seaweed, or sauces. Whether a particular city can sustain a particular ethnicity or regional grocer not served by mainstream and counterculture stores requires sufficient density of demand from recent migrants and adventurous foodies to keep it going. I don't think expecting TJ's or WF's to carry many types of tofu is itself reasonable if there's not enough demand or the store is particularly small (most TJ's are relatively small).
Go to almost any mainstream grocery store in America, and you will find it difficult to find a simple international ingredient like canned tahani. Most American grocery stores are provincial and so expecting them to offer different forms of tofu is several steps away from their current reality.
Here's to a hope there are more ethnic alternative stores like what Pier 1 imports was.
This analogy captures a bit of variety found in both cheese and tofu.
The result is roughly the same.
There have also been efforts to tax "bad for you foods" particularly sugar. Where meat consumption has been villified and is absolutely a target.
Huh? Never heard of this and didn’t find anything on searching online. Would love to know more..
Not sure if you're referring to Buddhism in general or Chinese Buddhism specifically.
Buddha was a Hindu by birth and was born in Lumbini, present day Nepal, so India side of the Himalayas, and spread in India before spreading out to the rest of the World. [0]
From the Wikipedia: He was born in Lumbini, present-day Nepal and grew up in Kapilavastu, a town in the Ganges Plain, near the modern Nepal–India border, and he spent his life in what is now modern Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are in India.
Buddhism first spread in India, when many Hindus became Buddha's followers, and then to the rest of the World.