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.

Salt and pepper tofu

August 14, 2022 12:18 PM

I don't know when my mom got into looking at recipes on the internet, but she has been raving about Made with Lau. They have videos on how to make a lot of classic Chinese dishes with good explanations on how restaurants make certain dishes that are hard to replicate at home.

One night during my usual youtube browsing, Made with Lau's recipe for Salt and Pepper Tofu showed up in my feed and I figured this was a good time to see what all the hype was about.

Okay, it looked really good. I had to try making it. It also looked like a lot of work. I'm sure any one of their videos could have shown up on my feed and I would have had that same reaction, so maybe I could have picked something simpler. But I watched the salt and pepper tofu video so salt and pepper tofu went on my mental list of things to make, and when something goes on my list, I have to make it.

I looked at their website and it lists 30 minutes as the total cooking time. This recipe requires you to boil, deep fry, AND stir fry the tofu! There is no way I could get this done in 30 minutes. I guessed it was going to take me 3 whole hours to finish it, so I needed to do this on the weekend when I had plenty of time.

Some parts of the recipe used such small amounts of ingredient that they seemed a little ridiculous to me. It requires 0.5 egg. What am I supposed to do with the other half?! I'm not going to waste half an egg! I'm also only supposed to use the white part of the green onion. Why would I do that when the green parts add so much nice color? During the stir fry step, I'm supposed to put a few dried chili peppers in the pan, stir around for 8 seconds, and then remove them. At least I already had a lot of dried peppers in my pantry, because I wasn't going to buy some just for this recipe.

But I guess this guy really knows what he's doing. The tofu turned out really well, and it only took me 1.5 hours to make! Half as much time as I expected (: Coating the tofu in cornstarch was kind of a mess, and I got cornstarch all over my kitchen, but overall, not too hard to make.

I couldn't just eat tofu though. I made some rice and a Korean spinach side to go along with it. And I still kind of wanted some actual meat, but this was already way too much work, so I went to Aldi and bought some precooked Hawaiian chicken thighs that I could just heat up in the microwave.

It was a very, very good meal.