Andrea Nguyen's Asian Tofu Teaches You to Make Your Own

By Jonathan Kauffman Tue., Mar. 20 2012 at 10:45 AM

Categories: Books, Events

If you move in food-obsessive circles, you'll see certain recipes become cult projects. David Chang's ramen from the Momofuku Cookbook. Modernist Cuisine's pressure-cooker caramelized carrot soup. Chad Robertson's master bread recipe in Tartine Bread. SFoodie suspects the next one will be tofu from Andrea Nguyen's new cookbook, Asian Tofu.

The Santa Cruz-based writer, author of Into the Vietnamese Kitchen and Asian Dumplings, has just come out with a gorgeous new book honoring soybean curd in all its forms: silken, pressed, custard, fermented. The recipes reflect cuisines from India to Japan; some are vegetarian, others aren't.

Jonathan Kauffman

The soy milk we just made from Nguyen's cookbook.

The core of her book is a series of master recipes that teach readers how to make soy milk and several kinds of tofu at home. The ingredients and equipment aren't difficult to come by, especially if you live near Japantown, and instructions are spelled out in clear detail.

SFoodie had hoped to finish the master recipe before writing about Nguyen's reading at Omnivore Books this Saturday, but we're still waiting for our tofu mold to arrive from Amazon.

As we type, however, we're drinking a hot mug of thick, sweetened soy milk with a lilting, beany fragrance -- a 30-minute project that yielded the same quality as the soy milk we used to pick up from Seattle's Vietnamese tofu makers every week. If it's any measure of the success of Nguyen's recipes, we'll be making tofu skins by next week.

Andrea Nguyen's Asian Tofu Reading
Where: Omnivore Books, 3885a Cesar Chavez (at Church), 282-4712.
When: Saturday, March 24, 3-4 p.m.

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Cost: Free