#3 Stuffed Tofu





































My mom has a very similar dish in her cooking repertoire. In her version, she uses tofus and eggplants as the vessels for the filling which is primarily fish paste. I'm not really a fan of fish paste so her version never grew on me. On the other hand this dish doesn't have any fish paste so it's very tasty. On the down side, it was long and difficult to prepare; I didn't even finish making the final product!

Easiness: 1/5 
Tastiness: 5/5
Verdict: Really tasty. But the effort of mincing 5 things and then steaming and frying fragile tofu is way too much for the average busy person. I felt a bit on the overwhelmed side for this one. This recipe would be better if you were making for a larger crowd and had a proper machine to do the mincing for you. I also recommend skipping the frying part. A steamed-only version of the dish is pretty darn good already.

Ingredients:
4 oz veggie ham
6 baby carrots
3 shitake mushrooms
2 oz pickled cabbage
2 oz water chestnuts
1 package of firm tofu
1 teaspoon ginger
pinch of salt, sugar, veggie seasoning, cornstarch
cornstarch for dusting




Buy firm tofu. I bought a regular one and it was too soft which is why I couldn't finished the making it. Cut the tofu into six section (first in half then in thirds). Using a spoon, scoop out the center of each tofu. Reserve the scooped out section.


Mince the veggie ham, carrots, mushrooms, water chestnuts, pickled cabbage. Mincing is a lot of work so I decided to incorporate a little technology, but this was a bit of a wrong turn. I introduce to you the Hamilton Beach hand blender.


Great right? All the mincing will be easy as pie? Nope! Food flew everywhere and food got stuck in the blades and didn't really mince everything. In the end, it was just easier to use good ol' knife and board. If you have a small chopping machine I think that would work in this case. But don't use a hand blender like I did. Leave the hand blender to making smoothies or something like that. Here is the final result of my hand blending and knife/board work.

Start first stir frying the mushroom and ginger. Then add in the rest (veggie ham, carrots, water chestnuts, pickled cabbage, scooped out tofu) and continue stirring. Add a pinch each of salt, sugar, veggie seasoning, and cornstarch.


Fill back the tofu vessels with the filling. At this point I had about enough leftover filling to add two more tofu vessels.  Also, be careful while handling the tofus. They were very fragile for me. This is why I recommend firm tofu. Steam for five minutes. 

So this is where in the recipe I stopped. The tofus were too soft to keep going. I would've broken them and there would have been nothing left to really take a picture of. Even though I stopped here I think it's not entirely necessary to keep going. The results were very tasty without having to give these guys that extra fry. 






















    

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