Mar

Salt and Pepper Tofu

Book: Secrets of the Red Lantern by Pauline Nguyen Theme: Soft Recipe: Salt & Pepper Tofu

First of all, I have to apologise profusely about being useless with the whole Cookbook Challenge thing. I am going to catch up. I promise. This was for Week 7 with the theme of soft. The reason this has stopped because my computer has decided to stop recognising my portable hard drive so my photos have been stuck there. That, and I have been away a lot and um, lazy!

First of all I love, love, LOVE the Secrets of the Red Lantern. It was the only cookbook I have ever read from start to finish (skipping the recipes) because it is just a truly special book. I remember sniffing on the train reading it everyday!

The theme soft was inpired by my (then) recent visit to New Kum Den where I fell hard in love with their salt and pepper tofu and soft tofu is one of my favourite soft foods ever. I unfortunately had decided that I should half wing it and half follow the recipe. I went for two separate types of tofu – one Japanese silken tofu and one egg tofu. I found that the egg tofu was by far tastier and much easier to handle while the silken tofu tasted average and was extremely hard to handle.

Anyway! What a disaster! I hate deep frying stuff, it’s horrible. Messy, messy, messy! Because I used the silken and egg tofu, I had to adapt a little. To be perfectly honest, this recipe really isn’t worth the hassle. Not only that, I managed to forget about the oil and caused a HUGE fire! Lesson learned: go and buy a fire blanket and keep it handy. Australia Post sells them relatively cheaply.

Salt & pepper mix

1 tsp of white pepper, ground (I ground the peppercorn in pestle & mortar)
1 1/2 tsp of salt
1 tsp of ground ginger
1/2 tsp of five spice powder

Mix all ingredients together well.

Deep fried tofu

tofu
corn flour to dust
oil for deep frying

Heat vegetable oil in a saucepan until it shimmers. Carefully slice the tofu and dust with the corn flour and deep fry until golden brown. Season with the salt & pepper mixture.

Spring onion mixture