Vegan MoFo - Home made tofu

I've wanted to make tofu for such a long time but certain things have held me back. I looked into the process and wasn't sure where to get a coagulant so I pushed tofu making into the back of my mind. When Steph posted about her experience of attending a tofu making class in Beijing earlier this year, my interest was piqued and I took it a step further by purchasing some organic soy beans but still couldn't track down the coagulant.

It wasn't until reading Tofu Mom's post recently that I hunted again and found that calcium sulphate (also known as gypsum) is also used in home brewing. This ingredient I had been searching for was actually available at a home brew store down the road all this time! Tofu Mom provided links to three different tofu making methods, it was the first I followed which uses calcium sulphate. I found the process pretty easy, it takes a while from start to end but there is a lot of slack time in between steps. Here is a summary of my tofu making day last weekend.

400 grams of soy beans were soaked overnight, then drained in a colander and rinsed well with water. After placing the soy beans in the blender I filled it up with filtered water to couple of centimetres above the beans.

The soy beans were processed into a paste.

The contents of the blender were poured into a stockpot with 4.5 litres of filtered water and the temperature brought up to between 82C (180F) and 93C (200F) for 30 mins.

The mixture was strained with cheesecloth into a couple of bowls. The leftover pulp okara can be used in baking, I didn't have time to look up recipes for it and froze it for the time being. The strained milk was returned to stockpot and the temperature heated up to 93C (200F).

3 teaspoons of calcium sulphate was mixed with 3 cups boiling water. 3/4 of this mixture was poured into the pot initially and stirred through once. The heat was turned off and the pot sat undisturbed for 10 mins. The liquid was still cloudy after this time so I stirred through the rest of the coagulant as directed. If the liquid is clear there is no need to do this.

The tofu curds were removed from the pot with a slotted spoon and placed into the Tofu Xpress lined with cheesecloth. I didn't realise when I purchased the Tofu Xpress that it could also be used in the tofu making process and was thankful that I decided to buy the additional lighter tension spring that was required for this purpose. The curds released a lot of water for me initially so I drained the excess several times. After the tofu had been resting for 30 minutes the Tofu Xpress was plunged into an ice bath for 1 hour, after that the tofu was ready to eat.

Since my latest motivation to make tofu came from Tofu Mom and I loved the sound of the recipe in one of her recents post I decided to give the Fried Tofu Chik'n Style recipe a go. This was a perfect way to try out the tofu, it was crispy and tasted fantastic and I loved the combination of the vegan mayonnaise, nutritional yeast and soy milk dipping paired with the sage, "chicken" stock, garlic power and cayenne pepper breading.

I love eating tofu a lot so it was very rewarding to finally give tofu making a try. I definitely won't be doing this all the time but will enjoy making a batch every now and then to enjoy a special recipe or two.