Tofu Culture

Shen Keng, a small town half an hour's bus ride south of Taipei, is the heart of tofu culture, where huge amounts of this Chinese staple are made, cooked, sold, and eaten. Visitors funnel into one narrow street, lined on both sides with food, shuffle to the end of it and then shuffle back, stopping to gorge on tofu as they go, grazing at will.

Tofu has become an inescapable subject recently; health experts, doctors, and nutritionists are almost begging us to eat it. It fights cancer, especially prostate and breast cancer, it dissolves cholesterol, it's an elixir and an aphrodisiac. Well, maybe not the last two, I am getting carried away; but the Chinese would have you believe all kinds of things about tofu.

A lump of plain tofu suddenly plonked on your tongue is not a gastronomic delight: It is tasteless with a cool, jelly-like texture; it does not go down well. However, the Asian palette, being more discerning and refined, regards this plain preparation of their favorite food very highly; lumps of it are put in everything from soups to stews to boiled vegetables. Often in restaurants I get bowls of clear broth in which are floating nodules of plain, white, unappetizing tofu.

Tofu, though, does become more palatable with the right preparation and cooking. It can be marinated, dried, or fermented; grilled, fried (deep, shallow, or stir), stewed, or barbecued; in all shapes, sizes, and flavors. One of my favorites is dried, finely-diced tofu, stir fried with green beans. Recently, in Taiwan, a new delicacy has appeared at night markets and roadside stands: a big rectangular lump of marinated and fermented tofu, barbecued over charcoal and served on a stick -- kebab style.

Shen Keng is the center of all this tofu culture, and thousands of locals make the pilgrimage here on weekends and holidays to feast on a very special variant of tofu: stinky tofu -- it stinks because it has been fermented. Shen Keng's most popular dish is a spicy, stinky-tofu stew.

At the front of the many eateries lining each side of the narrow street are huge, bubbling and steaming woks full of this red, vicious looking brew. Gas stoves blast the undersides of the woks with blowtorch ferocity and the heat and stink spill out onto the street, overwhelming the pilgrims as they shuffle by. Some restaurants are empty; while in others, sweating cooks are briskly slopping tofu stew from their vats into smaller bowls for customers at their tables.

I chose a half-empty restaurant; I'm not a connoisseur after all; I was just hungry. The owner pointed to an empty table halfway down the room and then yelled to a young girl, who quickly slid off the previous diner's bowls and chopsticks into a dirty slops bucket and gave the table a perfunctory wipe over. I sat on a stool and waited all of thirty seconds before my order of spicy stinky-tofu, which I had watched the cook at the front ladle into a small bowl, was delivered. I also got bowls of white rice, bamboo soup, and duck-blood soup (which I would rather not talk about). The stew, however, was good even though I had to douse the heat with mouthfuls of rice. The tofu had become off-white in colour and was not as tender as the normal kind -- I could actually chew it -- and the hot soup was bright red with liquid fat floating on the surface.

The first thing I saw on leaving the eatery was a middle-aged man, bent at the waist, pulling a stack of wooden pallets the height of his bent body. He had obviously just taken them out of the delivery van that was parked in front of me. I peered in and found slabs of white tofu on each small pallet. Mr. Wang, the tofu deliverer, was a charming man; in response to my questions he invited me to the factory the following morning.

I went, in search of authentic tofu, getting up at four in the morning to catch the start of production at five.

Number 87, Shen Ding Rd; it wasn't really a factory, just the ground floor of a five-floor building in a small ramshackle village five minutes beyond Shen Keng.

Between five and seven each morning, four employees of Mr. Wang, aproned and rubber booted, produce Taiwan's most succulent tofu in a surprisingly simple process, turning yellow soy beans into white tofu.

Wang Jr. scoops soaked soy beans out of a big plastic bucket into a grinder, which turns them into a milky white soup, caught by Wang in another bucket, which, when full, he skids over the slippery wet floor to Soo Mei.

Soo Mei ladles it into a double-sized wok over a full blast of heat, and stirs it with a shovel for twenty minutes, making it smooth. Using two dippers in two hands she then empties the steaming bean milk into a filtering machine which extracts the gunk. She releases the gunk into a bucket and tips it into another wok for re-boiling -- to further extract any remaining milk.

Ji Chun catches the hot filtered milk in a big metal drum, scooping off a mugfull for his breakfast. With one hand he pours in a congealing agent from an aluminium kettle, and with the other he uses a shovel to stir. After ten minutes he starts to scoop the now jelly-like, congealed tofu into small cloth-lined, wooden moulds for setting.

Wang Jr. stacks the moulds outside, on the roadside, one on top of the other, twenty five high, and then places two huge boulders on top, Water oozes through the cloth and out of the boxes as the tofu further sets and compresses. Twenty minutes later he flips the firm tofu out of the moulds and into pallets for stacking in the van.

Chi Jeng buckets the gunk, which has been sent through a hole in the wall, puts the buckets onto his scooter, and takes it away to a nearby farm for the pigs' breakfast. The tofu, meanwhile, heads off into the city.

I accepted a mug of fresh, warm bean-milk from Wang Jr., bought a slab of tofu, and started home for bed.

© Paul S. Davey, 2000

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Paul S. Davey is a freelance travel and fiction writer. He started life in the UK but now turns up in the strangest of places around the world -- usually with his notebook handy

novels:
Ghost Money first chapter of a new novel
Fei Azzis and the Water Table of Sa' An (coming soon)