A Vegan Called Bacon

Another good outcome of my tofu binge: I discovered I like Chinese five spice seasoning.  Normally I think it makes everything taste of cinnamon.  I think this stems from a bad spice experience as a kid.  My mum had a mysterious and exotic-looking spice collection which came out occasionally, like when she was baking a Christmas cake.  I found out that a spoonful of cinnamon tastes like shit.  I think this has tainted all cinnamon experiences since then, in the same way that drinking a whole bottle of Ouzo as a teenager causes the smell of aniseed to make you feel sick for the rest of your life.

But this was dead easy and I really liked it as a snack.  The type of tofu was bai yu, firm-white tofu.  It looked like this:

All I did was cut it into triangles, and ‘marinade’ it in a bowl of powder consisting of 1 part Five spice, 1 part salt, 2 parts sugar, some garlic, and some white pepper.  I rubbed the powder all over the pieces and left it for an hour or so.  Then I deep(ish) fried it in an inch of very hot oil, turning it over until it looked lovely and brown and crispy.

It tasted super-savoury, which is my thing.  The outside was crisp, the inside satisfyingly firm.  And the five spice wasn’t much like cinnamon at all.  Probably because I’d nuked it by frying it to death.