A Vegan Called Bacon

When we were in Yangshuo we used to hang out at this guy’s shop, eating tasty greasy fried noodles for nearly no money. I never really thought of fried noodles as a meal before we started scoffing the lot here.

The basic ingredients are garlic, ginger, chilli paste, fried in a bit of oil. Then add the secret ingredient: chopped Sichuan Pickled Greens (su cai) or a similar pickled packet vegetable. They sell them in Chinese supermarkets at home. Sichuan Greens are nice in any vegetable dish. Here’s two types of pickeld veggies - the first are some kind of green bean, the second are classic Sichuan greens.

Actually, he had some other secret ingredients, which I think were MSG and sugar, but my version tastes OK without.

Just soak flat rice noodles for the appropriate amount of time. Then heat up a little oil in a wok. Throw in chopped dried chillies or chilli/garlic paste, chopped ginger, and garlic. Sizzle. Add chopped pickled greens and chopped real greens (e.g. yellow flowering broccoli, finely chopped), and any other finely chopped veggies you fancy. Chuck in the noodles. Fry. Add a glug of light soy sauce and a small splash of sesame oil.

The end. It’s very nice. This one also included some fried, pressed tofu, and some coriander:

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.

One of the types of tofu I bought was tofu rolls. I wasn´t sure what to do with them. Turns out I did something completely inappropriate with them.

For lunch one day in a restaurant, I had a nice, spicy dish of thin strips of tofu (which I later learned was called doufu si, and is a very common salad-type dish), but all I could remember about it was that it was spicy. So, I thought I´d make a Gonbao Tofu dish by slicing the rolls lengthwise and stir frying them in a gonbao sauce.

I was wrong in a few ways, it seems. First, the rolls are meant to be eaten as rolls. Slicing them thinly in strips and then laboriously unpeeling the resulting thin spirals into strips is a complete waste of time, because it turns out you can buy ready-made strips. Second, they are really meant to be eaten cold, as a salad. If you stir-fry them, they go far too crispy, very quickly (I did manage to get them just a little crispy, and it was OK). Third, the traditional flavouring for doufu si isn´t gonbao, but a light dressing of ground sichuan pepper, a sprinking of chilli, some fresh coriander, and some fennel seeds.

Still, it tasted OK, and gave me a chance to learn how to make a better gonbao sauce. Gonbao is a vinegar-and-sugar based sauce, stirred in at the end with peanuts. The first time round I wasn´t bold enough with really laying on the flavouring. So the second time round, I used a firmer, chunkier tofu, and a really decent amount of gonbao sauce. It worked much better.

Gonbao sauce should consist of two big glugs of black Chinese vinegar; one-and-a-bit glugs of a mixture of light and dark soy sauce; a couple of teaspoons of sugar (a quantity enough to match the vinegar); a dribble of sesame oil; and a small amout of water (or stock). You then stir in maybe a teaspoon of corn or potato starch to thicken it up a bit, remembering to stir it again just before you pour it into the stir fry. The peanuts should be the roasted, unsalted, still-in-their-red-shells variety.

The stir-fry should start with chillis and Sichuan peppers, continue with plenty of garlic and ginger, and then include your ´meat´ substitute, and some very finely diced or small vegetables such as carrot and/or peas. Don´t forget some spring onions (scallions) towards the end, again finely chopped.

The tofu I ended up using wasn´t something I got the name of, but it was a marinated/five-spice flavoured type, which appeared to have been both deep fried and compressed. It had a great texture for this kind of recipe.

So, a good excursion into two more types of tofu, though I felt a bit silly unwinding perfectly good rolls into strings.

I decided the other day I’d be avoiding fetid tofu for the time being. In the mean time I’ve been trying to find ways to use furu.

I’ve asked around. Someone has suggested sticking it in cheesecake. It’s a bit like stilton, so I’m thinking about putting it in Broccoli soup. In Chinese cooking, it’s most commonly used as a flavouring in green vegetable dishes… just stir in a cube (or half a cube) into some stir fried beans, along with the usual flavourings.

I’ve also tried putting a cube on the side of my plate and nibbling bits with the rest of the food, like a pickle. It was pretty good.

I’m told people spread it thinly on bread. I tried it with Marmite but I think this was a bad choice with a hangover. The crazy salty sharp cheesiness made my headache twice as bad.  I’ll try that again some time, in the afternoon, not for breakfast.

Someone I met from Hong Kong told me they used to eat deep fried furu from street vendors for breakfast on the way to school. I searched the web for clues about this dish but couldn’t find any. So, I tried deep frying chunks which were dipped in vegan tempura batter. Mmmm, greasy.

It was frankly a bit too intensely flavoured for me. But I might try it again some time. I can tell this is one of those things which goes from not-particularly-pleasant to addictive following repeated exposure, like olives or beer.

The batter worked great though. I’ve used the same batter before to coat banana slices, and then served them with whipped coconut cream and melted chocoate as a desert.

It’s basically twice as much corn flour as plain white flour, a decent pinch of baking soda, and some ice cold beer. The trick is not to add too much beer. It’s easily done and the batter doesn’t stick to the food you’re frying.

Incidentally, this was with the spicy furu in hemp oil.  The really red stuff (”da kuai doufu“) which tasted lie miso is a nice all-purpose flavouring.  I think it will work really well in a soup.

My tofu eating marathon continues with an intrepid expedition into the world of Fermented Tofu. This is tofu which has been injected with bacteria and left to fester, just like cheese. Apparently it is very good for you… anti-mutagenic, in fact, which maybe means it acts as a shield against death rays.

Generally, people call it “stinky tofu”. I’ve seen it called “Chinese Cheese”, and there is definitely something cheesey about it. Most of the stuff is called furu in Mandarin, which appears literally to mean something like “spoiled milk”, and is generally translated as “fermented tofu”.

Here’s the ones I bought, with samples laid in front:

The jars, from left to right, are “Spicy Furu in Hemp Oil”, “Fetid Tofu”, “Big Chunks of Furu“, and “White Furu in Hemp Oil”. Read the chunks left-to-right, top-to-bottom.

I tried them with some trepidation. The results:

Conclusion: I’ll use furu again. The ones in hemp oil were very cheesey.

I think I will never touch the fetid stuff ever again, anti-mutagenic or not. Here’s a close up.

Mapo Doufu (Pockmarked Old Woman’s Tofu) is one of the most popular tofu dishes in China. Its traditional flavours are tofu, fried ground pork, mala, and doubanjiang (Sichaun Bean Paste).

You basically fry the ground pork so it’s a bit crispy, and set it aside; fry the bean paste in oil for 30 seconds, along with some extra chillies and sichuan pepper; then add some stock and boil chunks of soft tofu in that, with some scallions or leeks. Add the pork back in, and finish by thickening it with some potato or corn starch.

I encountered several challenges in preparing this. I didn’t have any vegetable stock, which doesn’t appear to exist in China (only pork, chicken and beef stocks), so I used Marmite (which travels with me everywhere, of course). I couldn’t find doubanjiang, so I used a red bean chilli garlic paste, which you can find everywhere.

Talking with a meaty person, they said the pork is a pretty important part of the dish. They told me it adds a slightly crunchy, chewy texture, and a slightly smoky flavour. I got  excited in a tofu geek kind of way when I realised I could try substituting ground smoked tofu (doufu xun yu, “firm smoked tofu”) for ground pork. It meant I could use two types of tofu in one dish and make a good start to my tofu marathon.

The soft tofu was yellowish and smelled of egg. I took a nibble and it tasted of egg too. I looked up the Chinese characters on the label. Egg tofu. Shit. I ran to the market next door and found an old guy selling tons of fresh tofu products. It seems that tofu made that very morning is a delicious thing. It wobbled enticingly on the plate and smelled very delicate and moreish. I need to find a fresh tofu seller when I get home. And it cost 10p.

All mapo doufu recipes I’ve seen call for you to boil the tofu chunks in salted water before continuing. I tried this and kept some other chunks aside for comparison. I have no idea what boiling is meant to do, but the flavour and texture of the boiled and unboiled versions was the same. If anything, the unboiled one tasted better.

Next up, making the “pork”. I chopped the smoked tofu into tiny cubes and then mashed them with the back of a fork. I gues you could use a blender or a big pestle and mortar to do the same thing. It looked like this (that’s Beijing in the background):

Then I fried it in very hot peanut oil for a few minutes until browned and a bit crispy, while still being chewy.

Finally, I just followed the recipe… frying the spicy stuff and the paste, boiling the tofu with “stock” and some onion-type things, stirring in the “pork” and some thickener at the end. You have to stir it very carefully or the tofu gets mushed up.

End result: a pretty tasty dish. I needed to adjust the flavours at the end by adding a bit of Chinese “sherry”, because it wasn’t rich enough. I think if I’d used a decent stock it would have been fine without. I also need to find a better chilli paste, preferably proper doubanjiang. The one I used was quite salty so I held back on it, meaning the dish wasn’t as spicy as I’d have liked. I also used ground Sichuan Pepper which doesn’t have so much flavour, so my mouth hardly got numb at all. But I think for most people who just like “normal” spicy, it would have been just right.

Plus, I think the “pork” worked a treat. My first point on the texture scoreboard.

I keep being told by proud Chinese people that China has 2000 types of tofu. I don’t know about that, in fact I don’t believe a word of it. But, embolded by my decision to investigate vegan textures, and by the fact I’m hanging around in Beijing with nothing much to do, I thought I’d see how many types I could buy in the fairly shit local supermarket.

The answer: about 25, though I “only” bought 16:

Problem is, some of it’s going to start going off pretty quickly, so I’ve got to start to cook it right away. The race is on.

Highlights of the above haul include the bizarrely rubbery “worn out building tofu” (in the green bag at the front) and the “complex mixture tofu” (one of the unappetising brown ones nearer the back); but most exciting of all, the jars, which include the excitingly named “foul bean curd”, “pockmarked spicy rotten milk in oil”, and “big chunks of rotten milk”. Bring it on!