Actually, of course, the Japanese consume great quantities of "white" tofu, with a bit of soy sauce and in a variety of other ways. But then they've had a head start of a few centuries over Westerners in appreciating this great food.

I'm sure the Chinese and Koreans also like "white" tofu, too, but I'm not as familiar with their cuisines as I am with Japanese cooking.

"Let's start here: Your tofu should never be white. Certainly not in a dinner context. The question with tofu, rather, is how brown. Just as you cook fish until it's no longer opaque, and you cook chicken until it's no longer a pale pink, you should cook tofu until it's no longer white. You should cook it on high heat, in plenty of oil. If you have it, you should use sesame oil."

Gibberish.

As long as you have access to good, fresh tofu, things like yakko tofu are delicious.

Even simple plain cold tofu with a bit of soy sauce can be yummy.

And in plenty of cooked dishes - take mapo tofu as an example - the tofu is not browned, but is left white and soft.

We're working against decades of bad tofu and prejudice here. Later on, folks can work their way back to white tofu. They can even use the silken stuff. For now, we need rules. We need to restore trust. This is tofu you can believe in.

Now when it comes to a choice of soy-based food preparation, my candidate is Mr. Bittman, of New York. He may be a patsy of the elite East Coast media , but the freezing really works.
Remove the corrupt water establishment, and replace it with the flavour combination you desire.

I'm with Ezra. Fry it. With garlic. Done right, it should be a light brown on the outside and soft and white on the inside. But I'm a fan of mixed textures in food. Tofu really gives you that option. It is certainly unfairly maligned.

Tofu? You can take the boy out of Santa Cruz, but you can't take the Santa Cruz out of the boy.

I second the freezing technique. That's how I learned to use it approximately a million years ago when I was in college. It gives it a little chewiness.

Ezra, can you use olive oil instead of sesame? I tend to prefer olive oil.

Thank you for the suggestions.

Also, you can dip it in soy sauce or Bragg's aminos and garlic powder and/or ginger powder and bake it while you're chopping your veggies, then stir fry them all together.

I assume you really cook your fish until it IS opaque. Perhaps you meant until it's no longer translucent?

The best tofu I ever tasted was barbecued, on a skewer, at The Continental in Philadelphia. I thought tasty tofu was beyond my meagre culinary skills, but you've almost convinced me to give it a try.

"Ezra, can you use olive oil instead of sesame? I tend to prefer olive oil."

If you're using high heat, olive oil isn't always the best to use because it burns at low temperatures and can also cause cancer-causing oxidants. I tend to use oils made for high heat use (I've been able to find canola, sesame and sunflower oil made for high heat. but not olive).

Petey, Ezra's trying to build a majority for tofu. That's why he wants to use the golden-brown fried stuff as a wedge. Once we've got people used to that for say, ten years, and the majority has realized how good it is, there's a back door into Soft Tofu For All.

An expeller pressed canola oil has better high heat performance, it seems to me, than a chemical extraction oil. The expeller pressed ones I've purchased are lovely to cook with. Better performance all around (better non-stick properties) and better flavor too. More expensive, but well worth the money.

If you haven't already, try finding egg tofu at a Japanese or Chinese supermarket. It's much more flavorful than the usual variety, especially when fried.

Next recipe: stinky tofu!!!

Sorry, I always bring of stinky tofu whenever somebody blogs tofu. The problem with other kind of tofu is they don't stink enough.

Don't write off silken tofu so fast!
It's delicious when mixed into rice, gives it this great thick texture.
A recipe:
Heat water in a saucepan and add mushrooms, spinach, edamame beans, maybe a little bit of broccoli. Once the vegetables are well cooked, strain them but SAVE THE WATER. It pretty much functions as a homemade vegetable broth so use it to cook the rice (white or brown). When the rice is cooked, mix in silken tofu and sesame seeds. Put cooked veggies on top and pour on soy sauce and sriracha hot sauce to taste. Add sliced avocado on top.
D-LISH.

I say, silken tofu now, silken tofu tomorrow, silken tofu forever!

wow, great photo. now i have a urge to run to the grocery store....

"Petey, Ezra's trying to build a majority for tofu. That's why he wants to use the golden-brown fried stuff as a wedge. Once we've got people used to that for say, ten years, and the majority has realized how good it is, there's a back door into Soft Tofu For All."

But if the menu is only open for editing for two years, say from January 2009 to October 2010, it's an abominable waste to leave the best recipes off the menu...

Hah. There's something awesome about seeing Petey attacking Ezra's tofu recipes, then Neil coming in and gently trying to persuade him of the long-term wisdom of Ezra's ideas in gaining public acceptance of tofu. All that's necessary now is an insinuation from Petey that Ezra is a corrupt careerist for supporting crispy browned tofu and that Matthew Yglesias's tofu recipes are hopelessly compromised by his trust-fund financial interests. Maybe a few posts from Anonymous and Patton about how liberals ruined tofu and we could have the perfect parody of an Ezra Klein comment thread.

As far as oils go, make sure that if you're using sesame oil, it's the refined sesame oil intended for cookng, not the toasted sesame oil intended for salads dressings, sauces, etc. Using toasted sesame oil for cooking will not work out well. (I say this because personally, I only have the toasted variety intended for salads, flavoring, etc, and Ezra's advice seemed rather off to me, since toasted sesame oil doesn't work for frying. I then Googled a bit and found out about the distinctions between toasted and refined varieties of sesame oil. (Previously, I hadn't really realized that any sesame oil was good for high-temperature cooking.)

That looks a lot like one of my tofu recipes, Tofu and Broccoli with Peanut Sauce.

Also, a minor quibble: What you mean instead of "firm tofu" is Chinese-style tofu, the kind that comes in a tub with water and is found in the produce section of the supermarket, or at least is chilled. Japanese silken tofu (Mori-Nu) is shelf stable for many months. It can be firm also.

Chinese style tofu comes in medium, firm, and extra firm, unless you're buying it at a British supermarket, when you're lucky to get any tofu at all so quit complaining!

Also, you should always cook Chinese style tofu well to kill any bacteria that may be living in the water. Don't try one of those "mock egg salad" recipes with it.

I must be one of those people who's never had it prepared well... despite having encountered it thousands of times.

In miso soup, in vegetarian stir fry, on truly awful tofu burgers. You name the form, I've tried tofu in it. Mainly because I was a vegan for 13 years and now my dad's one.

No matter what form its in, no matter how its prepared, I've always thought tofu is just this bland nothing stuff, an emptiness in the middle of some other dish. Sure, it soaks up flavours around it, distributing them throughout its spongy mass so that it always tastes (to me) like a wan substitute for whatever's around it.

I don't dislike the stuff, I just can't see what there is to actually like about it.

Important information for the schrunken brain set:

http://www.mercola.com/article/soy/index.htm

Ezra won't tell you but I will; you should not enter alliances with SOY, nor domestic, unrepentent terrorists like Dohrn and Ayers.

People should also remember that, just like fish, a lot of people will never like tofu. It doesn't matter how good you think it is. It doesn't matter how you cook it. There will always be people who don't really like certain food.

I don't like cake or cookies. I never have. I never will. It doesn't matter how universally beloved some foods are, there will always be people that don't like them.

Enjoy your soy...who needs rainforests anyway.

The story BIG SOY doesn't want you to know:

The key drivers of increasing Amazon forest loss are rising deforestation and land speculation along new highways and planned highway routes, and the dramatic growth of Amazonian cattle ranching and industrial soybean farming.

"Soybean farms cause some forest clearing directly," said co-author Philip Fearnside of Brazil's National Institute for Amazonian Research in Manaus. "But they have a much greater impact on deforestation by consuming cleared land, savanna, and transitional forests, thereby pushing ranchers and farmers ever deeper into the forest frontier."

"Soybean farming also provides a key economic and political impetus for new highways and infrastructure projects, which accelerate deforestation" Fearnside said.

Forgive the Gaia, for they know not what they do...

Why you gotta hate on the silken? Sounds like some anti Chinese bias on this seemingly respectable blog...

Great post and thread. Note: the VAST majority of soybean crops are used for animal feed.

Viva freezing tofu!

To overcome tofu prejudice, I've had great success with this chocolate mousse pie, made with silken Mori-Nu tofu. It's indescribably delicious, with a wonderful mouthfeel. I generally use darker bittersweet instead of semisweet chocolate.

Try it: it's VERY easy and tasty.

tofu, hot peppers, garlic, and bacon. i had some combo of this at least twice a week when i lived in china. the tofu and the hot peppers should be should be sliced thinly. its best with some milder peppers that are big and some small ones that are very hot. also crush the garlic in half ass sort of way, so its still mostly intact. lots of great texture and flavor. you of course can do this without the hot peppers or the bacon but that would be wrong.

scallions as well.

"To overcome tofu prejudice, I've had great success with this chocolate mousse pie, made with silken Mori-Nu tofu. It's indescribably delicious, with a wonderful mouthfeel. I generally use darker bittersweet instead of semisweet chocolate."

Now [i]there's[/i] tofu in a delicious looking form. I might just enjoy that. Thanks!

How do you italicize in comments? Do ordinary html tags work?

Anonymous, most soy is grown for livestock consumption, not for human consumption. The problem with deforestation is not soy, per se, but the fact that so much soy needs to be grown in order to feed livestock. When the soy is consumed directly by people (in tofu, for example) then you cut out the middle man, as it were, and so less, not more land ends up being cultivated. When you eat soy-fed livestock, you're actually consuming a whole lot more soy and thus contributing to much more deforestation than when you consume the soy (or corn, for that matter) directly.

Tofu will be unpopular as long as we insist upon using old tofu.

In Japan, tofu goes off faster than milk, and only sits on the store shelves for a few days. One traditional figure of Japan was the tofu deliveryman, analogous to a milkman, who would ride a bicycle around the neighborhood delivering fresh tofu.

On of the best meals I've ever had was yuudofu--plain tofu in hot water--at a restaurant in Kyoto. I wouldn't try that with something that's been sitting out for months.

A big winner among tofu skeptics (though it works better if you don't tell them what it is ahead of time) is pressed (and marinated) tofu. Started doing this based on a Kenneth Lo Chinese vegetarian cookbook, but I'm guessing the internets have guidance as well. Definitely adds some lead time for prep, but it is very appealing in terms of taste and texture as well as appearance.