A Vegan Called Bacon

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!

Sichuan people are very proud. They speak a crazy dialect and insist it’s the right way of speaking Chinese. And they do the best line in spicy food I think I’ve ever found. Super hot, but also with a crazy numb sensation. It makes your mouth feel like a big fleshy balloon has just landed in it. I was convinced it was some kind of terrible artificial chemical and was horrified when I first tasted it.

It turns out to be a flavour called “ma” which means “numb”. Most spicy things in Sichuan are actually “mala”, numb-spicy. The source of this flavour is a spice that looks like a red peppercorn. In English, it is called Sichuan Pepper but you often see it labeled Chinese Prickly Ash. In Chinese it’s called hua jiao and it’s something of a food craze here. You get it in instant noodles and all sorts.

Wierdly, once I knew it was natural and traditional, I suddenly developed a craving for it. And now I’m kind of addicted. Something which is both ma and la has something special about it. Chilli makes me feel high. Mala makes me feel delirious.

You can buy it as whole peppercorns, or ready-ground. I’ve found the ground ones are a bit shit and tasteless. The best result I’ve had so far is hot-frying a teaspoon or three in a generous bit of peanut oil in the bottom of a wok (along with a huge amount of dried chillis) before continuing with the meal. In soupy dishes, you can pour on extra mala oil in at the end for that extra kick, and oily sheen.

The other secret is that Sichuan recipes often call for a small amount of sugar. I’ve found the more firey-hot-numb a dish, the more the sugar balances the flavours.

Here in China it’s the last day of a 3 days mourning period for the victims of the Sichuan earthquake.

I’ve found it hard to know exactly what’s an appropriate response. It all seems very distant, something you watch on TV. I do know I find reports combining news of pandas with news of tens of thousands dead a bit inappropriate. Most people have given money, because it’s the only thing any of us can really do to help. Around Beijing, we’ve seen individuals lighting candles and sending them off in paper boats across city lakes. And in what seems to me to be a strange move, the government has decided to shut down all TV entertainment and websites. While, in fairness, their response does seem to have been overall excellent (compared to other governments in other disasters), they can’t resist their instinct to make political capital out of it.

So in the spirit of not knowing what’s appropriate, I thought I’d plough ahead and talk about a new favourite ingredient and act like that’s completely appropriate. If you’d like do donate something, I went for this children’s appeal by Half the Sky, or there’s always the Red Cross of Society China.

Today I read a frustrated rant about preachy vegans. I like unpreachy vegans. I want to be one. When you are ethically pure, morally consistent, infinitely compassionate and most definitely right, it’s pretty hard, but I like to think I try.

When we were in South America we met a great couple called Dan and Laura. Dan is a complete foodie. Especially when he’s had some glasses of wine. Then he starts talking tenderly and excitedly about food. When he talked about his dad’s vegetable plot in Guernsey, it practically made my eyes well up. And when he talked about some kind of meaty chicken thing involving taking all its bones out and rolling it up, even that sounded interesting.

One of the nice things about Dan is that he loves all food. He doesn’t think that a meal without meat is incomplete. He’s just as capable as getting excited about a shiny, bulbous, purple-black aubergine as a pimply, waxy duck carcass. It was great, because we both got to talk about food without anyone getting preachy.

I met a vegan the other day (at the Vegan Social Club of Beijing) who reckons every vegan dreams of opening a restaurant. Well, it has been decided, during our over excited, wine-drenched shouting, that Dan and I are without doubt going to open a restaurant where every vegan dish on the menu has a meat one next to it.

His meats would be “cruelty-free” (at least up to the point of slaughter). I would get a chance to convince meaty people that food without animals is OK. Vegans and non-vegans could go out for meals together. Dan and I would both learn more about food of all kinds. Maybe a couple fewer cows might die or a couple of pigs might lead a happier life.

I don’t know how many vegans would be into this kind of idea. Definitely not the preachy ones. I’m such a softcore vegan that when we were in Ecuador, and I was in charge of the kitchen on the farm, I actually cooked some kind of chicken in cream sauce for the workers (without tasting it, of course). Apparently it was really good, though I think they would say that, wouldn’t they.

I’m even quite interested in the mechanics of butchering and cooking meat. When our friend Esteban had a sheep slaughtered for his birthday I had to go away when they killed it - it was horrible. But once the deed was done, I quite enjoyed watching the neighbour use an ancient kitchen knife, wielded in a swish-slash-swish-sloosh-slash kind of way, to turn a previously terrified sheep into a set of chops, a woolly rug, and, well, a sheep’s head.

So, given I’m really only opposed to killing animals, rather than to meat itself (obviously I’m not going to buy or eat it), I’ve been thinking more about bringing the good stuff about meat into vegan food. It’s quite common to hear people express puzzlement about pretend meats (”I don’t see the point”), and it’s true that I don’t care for the taste of blood. And I have noticed the phrase “that really smells of fish” usually indicates distaste.

But one thing I’ve realised is that there is something missing in a lot of vegan cuisine that you get “for free” with meat, and that’s different varieties of chewy. So I hereby vow to investigate in full all its forms, chewy and preferably proteinous vegan foodstuffs, including seitan, tofu, and weird gelatinous things made from strange plants.

Who fancies some vegan whelk?