Two secrets for awesome tofu

There are two main camps when it comes to tofu.

The people in Camp A eat tofu out of the box with their fingers.

The people in Camp B have some very vivid descriptions for how tofu tastes, and I can only hope they aren’t speaking from experience.

Down the river is a very small camp of people that eat tofu because it’s what’s for dinner, but they would never pursue it on their own. Kind of like me and some of the shows I watch with my husband.

My two secrets for awesome tofu make it so good that people in all three camps will admit that it is, at the very least, more edible than most tofu. Camp A will beg you for the recipe. Camp B will consider letting you bring a dish to Thanksgiving. Camp C will keep being Camp C, but they will like it more.

I don’t want to keep you in suspense, so here are the two secrets to awesome tofu:

Secret 1: press tofu

Secret 2: bake tofu

Press the tofu

You can use cans, boxes, books. A small child. But I highly recommend investing in an actual tofu press. I briefly mentioned mine here. There was a time when I never pressed tofu. I thought it was for people with too much time on their hands (clearly not me). But pressing the liquid out of tofu makes it so much better, and with the right tool for the job, it’s not hard at all.

You can press the tofu for as little as 15 minutes and have good results, or you can leave it for a day and a half (oops). Sometimes I press tofu before I even know what I am doing with it. However long you end up pressing the tofu, press it to half its original width for best results. The texture improvement is amazing.

Bake the tofu

Next, we bake that beautiful tofu.

If you bake tofu straight on a cookie sheet, it is going to stick to the pan and leave little tofu skeletons when you pry it off. Don’t do that. Get some of these silicone mats and bake your tofu on them.

Baking tofu is so much easier than trying to fry it. Not only does it cut back on the oil you end up consuming, it’s faster, easier, and makes less of a mess. You can put it in the oven while you make the rest of dinner and not have to mess with rotating tofu cubes until they are perfectly done.

I like to bake my tofu with cornstarch on it so that it has a crisp coating that doubles as a sauce magnet. But it’s equally good without. You can marinate the tofu – or not. I tend to not.

This awesome tofu isn’t just for soy-saucy recipes. We make some pretty fantastic buffalo tofu wraps, and the tofu is also delicious with a coating of BBQ sauce. Leave it sauce-less and top your next salad with tofu cubes. The options are endless!