Tofu Making at The Hutong

Despite needing to remain in China and work through Golden Week, we still got sunday and monday off to relax before getting back to work.  Naturally, I went into Beijing to spend my days off at (my closest thing to home) Andi and Scuz's apartment.  (They now refer to their guest room as "Chirona's room.")

Sunday morning, the three of us learned how to make tofu from scratch at a Chinese cooking school called "The Hutong."  It was surprisingly easy, so much so that I can summarize it in a few steps and pictures:

1) soak soy beans overnight

2) add more warm water and blend soy beans

3) strain pulp from soy beans

4) add cold water and additionally strain

5) boil resulting liquid (this yields soy milk)

6) let sit until cooled down a bit

7) add vinegar to cause to curdle

8) let sit longer

9) separate curdled soy (tofu) from water

10) gather in cheese cloth and press with a weight to desired firmness, and you're done!

The "pulp" that is gathered from the soy milk is called okara, and we used this to make some delicious pancakes.

You can also not press the tofu together, i.e. just strain it from the liquid in step 9 above.  Our teacher took some of this and added soy sauce, sesame oil, and green onions.  It was delicious!

We got to take our tofu home, and we decided to press it for another hour or so.  Here's our resulting product.

We used this to make a stir fry sunday night that was delicious!  Thanks to Scuz and Andi for hosting as usual and for inviting me along on this adventure.  I'm hoping to go (finally) learn to make baozi this weekend :)

I promise a few more posts in the next week or so...