Mapo tofu

January 4, 2025 12:08 AM

I've been really into cooking tofu lately. In the past I would look at a tofu recipe, but I would replace the tofu with chicken, and honestly? I don't know why I did that. Tofu usually tastes better. And it's cheaper! It's only $1.55 for a block of tofu at Aldi! I think that's cheaper than the Asian stores around here!

So for a while I wanted to try making some mapo tofu. I've actually never had mapo tofu from a restaurant before. But a couple of my friends have made it and shared it with me and it was pretty good when they made it, so I wanted to try it myself. I decided to follow the recipe from Woks of Life, which claims that it's

the true blue, authentic real deal—the spicy, tongue-numbing, rice-is-absolutely-not-optional, can't-have-just-one-scoop mapo tofu that you get in the restaurants

Sounds a little scary actually 😬

Well, first I had to buy some spicy bean sauce. I initially looked in one of the local Korean grocery stores because it's nearby, and they were selling really large jars of it, and there was no way I was buying that much spicy bean sauce when the recipe called for 2 tablespoons at most. I ended up buying the smallest container I could find from another Asian store. It was 6 oz and I ended up making mapo tofu at least 4 times to get through it all! But I finally did today (actually yesterday, I'm just publishing this late), and I even used up some of that ginger.

The first time I made this, I tried to follow the recipe as closely as possible. The only things I changed were

• using extra firm tofu rather than silken (it's all Aldi sells)
• omitting the fresh Thai bird chili peppers
• and adding a little bit of Chinese five spice because another recipe called for it, and I really have no idea how I'm going to use up all of this five spice

And man was it peppercorn-y. SO PEPPERCORN-Y. I guess some people like the numbing effect, but I want maybe a hint of numbing. Not this.

It was also really oily. I think it's supposed to be like that, but it's a little too much for me.

So the next time I made it, I cut the amount of oil in half and decided to just cook it all in one pan. I would make the chili oil first, and then just leave it there to cook the rest of the dish with. I also cut the amount of peppercorn to 1 teaspoon.

These changes were good! But I think that keeping that chili oil in the pan the whole time made the dish really spicy. And I honestly don't handle super spicy foods all that well. Maybe it was this spicy the first time I made it, but I was so distracted by the peppercorn that the spicy-ness didn't hit me as hard.

So I kept making this and lowering the number of dried chilies, but it was still way too spicy. I also tried using silken tofu one time, but that really did just all fall apart.

So today, I told myself I would not put any dried chilies in this dish so it would not be spicy at all.

Okay, maybe one wouldn't hurt. I do have a really large bag of these dried chili peppers. Actually, two shouldn't be so bad...maybe three.

Nope, I made this too spicy again. At least I've finally used up the can of spicy bean sauce.