Tofu for 700

In the kitchen, it is my turn to make the tofu for the day. I have heard the other cooks say that soybeans make good famine food. They grow well in poor soil, help replenish it with nitrogen and generally provide a good yield. You can also cook them, sprout them, boil them, and even make a poor man’s coffee out of them if you are desperate enough. It doesn’t have the caffeine of the real thing, but it is nicely flavored hot water on a cold morning.

We get giant burlap bags of dried soybeans in on the supply truck once a month. It takes a lot of work to turn them into food, but it is worth it for the creamy smoothness of tofu. It makes for good curry, the best clay pot, and sometimes we even fry up a batch for salt and pepper tofu if we have enough pepper to make it nice and spicy.

The weirdest thing is that you use bath salts to make tofu. I would never have guessed it. Magnesium Sulfate is the stuff that turns soy milk into tofu curd. Once we ran out and we used gypsum the local beer maker loaned us. It was the creamiest smoothest tofu I ever ate.

Someone yesterday put the beans out to soak. They are in plastic buckets covered in water. I smell each bucket. There are no bubbles or film on the water and it smells fine. I scoop some of the water out to save for later steps in the process, then drain and rinse the beans, saving that water too, but for other stuff in the kitchen, not this recipe. I pinch a bean to check it. The two halves split apart easily and the interior is an even color of yellow all the way through. I break one of the halves easily with no bending at all. I do this same thing to several beans and they are all ready.

I fill our giant pot with water and set it to boil. I call it the cauldron and recite Macbeth while I stir the beans. “Double, double toil and trouble”, I chant in my weirdest witch’s voice just for me. I am here alone this afternoon. No eye of newt here, though, just soybeans. I have to stand on a step stool to see in the pot. We use a gas boiler to heat the water in this pot. It is more efficient and controllable than the solar heater since we have to render the milk. It takes a while for the water to heat, so I start to process the beans. It is also nice, because with a gas boiler, when the recipe says remove from the heat, all you have to do is cut the gas to the boiler.

Crushing the beans is a noisy process, but we have a decent operation worked out to make it go pretty fast. First, I give the beans a good chop on the cutting board, getting them down into coarse pieces. Next, I put small batches in the blender with some water and chop until the beans are a pasty puree.

I can do them all in about an hour, but I wear some headphones and listen to music while I do it to block out the sound. Today, I am listening to a book about a boy growing up in the ancient coal mines of northern Germany. It is beautifully written, but I don’t think I can even really imagine a coal mine or the dust. It must have been terrible to live with that taste in your mouth, that power in your lungs, that sting in your eyes. Listening to this story, I am glad we use gas and solar to run this kitchen.

I am ready to mix the puree into the water to make soy milk. I have a giant wooden paddle that I use to stir it in. I am careful to mix it so I always scrape the bottom and get anything that is settled down mixed up and in. The smell is pleasant, but the room gets hot with the pot and the steam. I am starting to sweat, just when the foam starts to form in the cauldron. I let the foam stiffen up and cut the gas to stop the process. I step back and wipe the sweat off my forehead with a kitchen towel. I give it a couple quick stirs and get my strainer ready. The pot has a spout at the bottom to drain the milk out. It is much easier than having to get the milk out from the top.

The milk drains through a cloth into a bucket. It goes slow and I have to swap out the cloth between buckets. This milk isn’t extra rich though so it does flow pretty fast. Every so often, I pull the cloth out and give it a twist and squeeze to get all the liquids out. Sitting on the stool I imagine I look like a girl from an ancient tale milking a cow, squirting milk into the bucket. Even now and then, I pour the still hot milk into a smaller pot as I work. This process takes nearly an hour, itself, but I don’t mind the work, especially with a nice book to listen to. Also, it means I won’t have to get dish duty for a while, since I’ll have all my hours in.

Now with all the milk in the pot, I can heat it back to just the right temperature. This pot is pretty fancy with a digital thermometer and heat controls built in, so I set it to 170F and turn the paddle stirrer on low to keep the milk moving. It needs to cook about 5 minutes at that temperature before I add the dissolved bath salts. I do it in three steps. I have practiced enough that cutting a z into the skin on top of the milk is second nature and everyone says I work the paddle just right, to get beautiful curds. I step back and let the process finish with a lid on the pot.

While the curds finish separating from the whey, I line the large flat molds with cloth, draping it over the sides. The molds are a beautiful wood, I don’t know what kind. I have four lined up on the counter now, ready for the curds. The lids to these presses are giant weights that will press the curds into solid blocks.

I take some of the whey out and moisten the cloth. I try to get most of the whey in to a bucket, but not pressing so hard to break a curd. It is okay if some whey remains. It will get pressed out. I carefully ladle the curds into the presses, fold the cloth up over the top of the curds and add the weighted lids. I’ll leave it now to set and clean up. Someone else will come along and take the weights and sides off when the tofu is about half what it is now. That makes the best tofu. Firm, but not too firm, creamy and delicious.