Tofu: The New Sushi

Many moons ago, eating sushi was an incredibly bold step, taken by only the most adventeruous gaijin. I mean, imagine. Eating fish. Raw. Heavens to murgatroid!

These days, you can buy sushi (“sushi”?) at Whole Foods. The guy who pumps your gas can probably rattle off his two or three favorite kinds of sashimi.

Luckily, though, there is a new food that seems to scare the pants off of first-time visitors to Japan: tofu.

Tell someone that you want to go to a tofu restaurant for dinner and a look of abject terror crosses their face. But, take them out for sushi and they’ll order a second helping of uni and demand the house recipe for shiokara (fermented squid guts).

This is probably a direct result of tofu’s close association with the American health food movement. So, instead of thinking of tasty dishes like agedashi tofu (fried tofu in a dashi broth), we think of a white, gelatenous slab, quivering on some hippie’s plate. Perhaps accompanied by a mouth-watering double helping of steamed millet.

But in Japan, tofu covers an incredibly wide range of delicacies. You can get tofu hard, soft, freshly made (sometimes at your table), flavored (seasame, black sesame, and citrus are personal favorites), fried, grilled, boiled or freeze-dried. That’s just scratching the surface and doesn’t even begin to cover other tasty soy products, such as yuba (the yummy skin that forms when you heat soy milk) or okara, the lees of tofu production that add flavor to some Japanese dishes.

So, all you tofu haters — come to Japan and discover the true (and truly delicious) nature of tofu.

Posted by pmk at December 4, 2004 7:57 AM | TrackBack