Fermented Tofu Misozuke Recipe

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September 26, 2012Fermented Tofu Misozuke Recipe

I came home on Sunday and inspected a couple of tubs of tofu thatI‘d left sitting in the fridge while I was away on the Pacific Northwest tofu tour. One contained creamy salty tofumisozuke, an old school type of fermented tofu from Japan that I’d made about 6 weeks earlier. I smeared a piece on bread to taste. It had mellowed and matured nicely while I was traveling.

The other tub of tofu – a block of super-firmtofu, had slimy white and orange stuff on it. I threw it out as it had clearlygone bad. That’s the difference between tofu that’s been preserved and not. Oneyou want to eat and the other you discard.

A while back, I posted a Q&Awith Dang Vu, a Vietnamese-American who’d started making and selling tofumisozuke in the Bay Area. A couple of Twitter friends suggested that I make thestuff so I did. There’s a fermented tofu recipe in Asian Tofu (see page 41) soI wasn’t daunted. Note that some people call tofu misozuke "vegan cheese." To me, it's just an Asian type of fermented tofu.

If you’ve had Chinese fermented tofu (fu ru in Mandarin, chao inVietnamese, tao  hu yi in Thai), tofumisozuke is similar, though relatively obscure in Japan. Its use seems to berelatively limited to eating it as a nibble or spread. In Washoku,Elizabeth Andoh suggests it as a snack food with drink. Chinese fermented tofu, on the other hand, is used as acooking seasoning for marinades, sauces, braises, stir-fries and roast meats.

What’s thelow-down? In a nutshell, if you salt tofu and then let it sit around, itwill break down into a creamy texture. Whereas Chinese fermented tofu sits in asalty and rice wine brine for months, Japanese tofu misozuke is coated withmiso, sake and sugar. Without these elements, the tofu grows mold and turnsslimy – just like regular cheese does.

Spoiled tofu and 6-week old preserved tofu misozuke

The ideais this: Block tofu is basically a dairy product. It’s made from the curdsthat result from coagulating soy milk, like how cheese is prepared. Let the soy or animal milk curds go bad in agood way and you get something rather tasty.

To make tofu misozuke, I applied concepts that I learned from developing the Chinese white fermented tofu recipe in the book:

Using firmer tofu makes prettier, sturdierchunks but they take longer to turn creamy because the curds are morecompressed.Waiting is the hardest part. It takes 6 to 8weeks for the stuff to mature.Taste on a weekly basis to monitor progress.The stuff was burpy to me at the front end.Ferment in the fridge for food safety’s sake.Tinker with the flavor. I made 2 trials andfound that going a little saltier was better. Blend your favorite misos.The white (shiro) miso is a type of Saikyo (sweet) miso purchased from Mitsuwa
The trickiest thing about this recipe is wrapping up the tofu incloth. The Japanese often marinate foods by wrapping it in cotton cloth andthen slathering the marinade on the outside. I used a piece voile (a thincotton fabric sold at fabric stores) so I could wash and reuse it. Muslin wouldbe a little too thick so yes, you could use a double layer cheesecloth. Youwant just a thin layer of fabric between the tofu and the tofu mixture.

So I spread some miso marinade on the bottom of my container thenlined it with the fabric. Then, I put the tofu in, cover it with fabric, then themiso. 

This is a great recipe for people who like to do science experiments in the kitchen. Or, if you just want to do something cool with tofu. I suppose you could also gift this for the holidays if you get started soon. 

RECIPE

TofuMisozuke

Yield: about 10ounces

Ingredients

10 to 12 ounces (280–336 g) medium-firm or firm tofu, organicor non-GMO preferred2/3 cup (7 oz, 200 g) white miso1 1/2 tablespoons (1 1/4 oz, 35 g) red miso1/4 cup sake3 to 4 tablespoons mirin

Instructions

Cut the tofu into two 1-inch-thick slabs. Place on a dry dishtowelor paper towels and set aside to drain for 15 minutes. Pat the tofu to remove excessmoisture.In a bowl, combine both kinds of miso with the sake and mirin.Adjust the flavor for a salty, sweet finish.Select a container to snugly contain the tofu in one layer. Spread1/3 of the miso mixture on the bottom. Arrange the voile (or cheesecloth) ontop. Place the tofu on the fabric. Then fold the fabric over the tofu. Spreadthe remaining miso mixture over the fabric to cover the sides and top. If needed,fold any excess fabric over the miso mixture. Cover the container and refrigerate for 3 or 4 days. If watergathers in the container during this period, pour it off. Nick and taste thetofu after this first period and it will seem really salty. Unwrap the tofu andtransfer it to another container lined with parchment, cover and refrigeratefor 5 to 8 weeks. (Discard the miso mixture and recycle the voile or discardthe cheesecloth.)You can eat the tofu after the first 3 or 4 days of marinating butit will mellow and transform as it sits longer. Put it in the back of thefridge and forget about it. You can cut off bits to monitor its progress. Ifound that at 6 weeks, mine was nice. I'm sure it'll be even better at 8 weeks. Enjoy as a cheese-like spread – onbread or a cracker. 

Related links:

My Q&A with Dang Vu of Rau Om on his Tofu MisozukeRau Om's recipe for tofu misozukeRecipe Renovator's recipes for tofu misozuke (Stephanie Weaver has variations)Posted in Asian Tofu, Recipes: All, Recipes: Appetizer and Snack, Recipes: Gluten-Free , Recipes: Gluten-Free Adaptable, Recipes: Tofu, Recipes: Vegan, Recipes: Vegetarian | Permalink

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Comments Fermented Tofu Misozuke Recipe

I came home on Sunday and inspected a couple of tubs of tofu thatI‘d left sitting in the fridge while I was away on the Pacific Northwest tofu tour. One contained creamy salty tofumisozuke, an old school type of fermented tofu from Japan that I’d made about 6 weeks earlier. I smeared a piece on bread to taste. It had mellowed and matured nicely while I was traveling.

The other tub of tofu – a block of super-firmtofu, had slimy white and orange stuff on it. I threw it out as it had clearlygone bad. That’s the difference between tofu that’s been preserved and not. Oneyou want to eat and the other you discard.

A while back, I posted a Q&Awith Dang Vu, a Vietnamese-American who’d started making and selling tofumisozuke in the Bay Area. A couple of Twitter friends suggested that I make thestuff so I did. There’s a fermented tofu recipe in Asian Tofu (see page 41) soI wasn’t daunted. Note that some people call tofu misozuke "vegan cheese." To me, it's just an Asian type of fermented tofu.

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Tofu Misozuke: Q & A with Dang Vu of Rau Om Foods

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February 06, 2012Tofu Misozuke: Q & A with Dang Vu of Rau Om Foods

Tofu is an extremely versatile food that can be manipulated in countless ways. A few months ago, Dang Vu emailed me about an unusual tofu product that he his wife, Oanh, had developed. The Vietnamese-American couple was selling tofu misozuke at Bay Area farmer’s markets, packaged under their company name, Rau Om (the name of a citrusy cuminy fresh herb also called ngo om; see the Viet herb primer for more info).

I’d read about the Japanese preserved “tofu cheese” in Elizabeth Andoh’s Washoku cookbook and seen it in Tofu Hyaku Chin, a 1782 bestseller in Japan. Alas, I hadn’t tasted it yet. It the world of Asian tofu, tofu no miso-zuke (how Elizabeth spelled it) is somewhat esoteric stuff. That is, a Japanese market or restaurant isn’t likely to have it.

I tried Rau Om’s tofu misozuke and found its meaty creaminess to be pleasant. Then I wondered why and how someone was introducing this rare tofu product to the Bay Area market. So I asked Dang, 32, to tell me a bit more about their background and endeavor.

He and Oanh, 29, have taken on the ancient preserved tofu product with vigor – even though Dang is finishing a doctorate program in molecular/cancer biology in Michigan and Oanh is a corporate strategy manager at Intuit in the Bay Area. They’re a long-distance couple with Ivy league credentials and a side passion for a food start-up. Both were born in Saigon and came to the States when Dang was 10 and Oanh was 16. They are accomplished at playing classical Vietnamese music and display a genuine appreciation for their elders. All that and they’re entrepreneurial too. (I am sure that my parents are reading this post with Viet pride and wishful thinking about their own children. It is unfortunately too late for me, Mom and Dad. ^_^)

Dang and Oanh’s achievements and tofu endeavor speak to the opportunities of living in America in the 21st century. Learn more about them and tofu misozuke below. My clarifications are in [brackets].

What is tofu misozuke?
A dish called misozuke tofu (miso-marinated tofu) has been around since the 13th Century We’ve had translated for us the tofu misozuke entry in a 1782 manuscript called Tofu Hyakuchin (????, 100 Tofu Delicacies). That said, most of what’s called tofu misozuke is usually aged overnight or up to a week. The version of tofu misozuke that we are producing have been aged for at least two months and can go to two years even. This version is a specialty of the Fukuoka region. When you cure tofu in miso for that long, the transformation is incredible - the texture is like a triple cream blue cheese or “a cross between butter and foie gras,” as a cheesemonger friend of ours put it.

My copy of Tofu Hyaku Chin is loaded with post-it notes. It's a fascinating book, if you read Japanese or have a friend who's willing to translate (like I did). Buy it from Kinokuniya bookstores. Use the characters or this cover image to clearly identify what you want.

Tofu misozuke is traditionally enjoyed straight, paired with sake or sochu. A small block, say a ¾” cube would be served with a cup of sake and one would savor very small pieces in between sips. That’s how we had tofu misozuke the first time in a sake bar while lost in Tokyo, and we were blown away. I mean, we’ve had all kinds of [fermented tofu] chao and tofu-ru before, tofu-yo from Okinawa, and stinky tofu, so we thought we had a pretty good idea of what tofu was capable of. But we were amazed and eating tofu misozuke straight, paired with sake or sochu, is still our preferred way to eat tofu misozuke. Of course, our customers here in the United States come from all over the world and we’ve had people tell us about their successful experiments with tofu misozuke paired with red wine and fresh or dried fruits, stuffed in olives, tossed in salad, served on grilled vegetables, etc... 

Tofu misozuke is relatively obscure. Why do you make it?
It’s very simple - we fell in love with tofu misozuke at the very first taste  and couldn’t get it again when we returned to the States. We asked at every Japanese restaurant or market we went to. We eventually found out when we blogged about our adventures that it was hard to find even in Japan.

We tried to find a  recipe but we couldn’t, at least not one with the long curing time we had encountered. So we researched and pooled together all the resources and skills at our disposal: searching PubMed for relevant scientific literature, searching the web in English and Japanese (with the help of Google Translate), looking for an electronic copy of an 18th century recipe book on the National Diet Library website, looking for and begging someone to translate the recipe for us, and setting up numerous experiments. (For our technical references, see this page.) With a little bit of luck, and a lot of failures, we finally managed to make tofu misozuke like what we had in Japan.

We started sharing it and everyone (well, not our parents) told us we ought to sell it. We have an amazing, world-class deli in Ann Arbor where we were living, and we’re friends with a couple of the guys behind the cheese counter and they too were telling us we had something really really cool on our hands. So we knew we were onto something.
 

Rau Om's tofu misozuke had a spreadable texture. It was tasty on a slice of toasted rustic whole grain.

What have been the challenges and payoffs of developing misozuke tofu?
Tofu misozuke was really frustrating to get right. During those months of aging, tiny differences in prepping get amplified. The long curing process also means more time for things to go awry. Once we finally got a working recipe, we encountered other problems scaling up, all also related to the fact that tiny changes have big effects. We had more failures than we would like to remember in the last 3 years. But luckily, our experience in scientific research helped to immunize us to failures and to see each batch we had to throw away as a learning experience that narrowed down our options for what the best recipe might be.

The first payoff was of course that we had tofu misozuke to satisfy our cravings. It’s also been a thrilling new experience to be promoting and defending our work in the public. I’m supposed to do that with anything I discover in the lab, too, but this is way more direct. To sample a  completely foreign food to strangers at the farmers markets and get the reactions we’ve been getting -- to see the amazement we felt in Tokyo reflected back -- that’s been a pretty heady experience and another wonderful payoff thus far.

The food business can be an iffy one. Why did you and Oanh decide to start one?
I guess a small part of it is that we wanted to see if we can’t build up something together.  We have two activities that we both enjoy a lot. One is cooking, the other is music -- specifically classical Vietnamese music (nh?c tài t?...I am studying the moon lute (dàn kìm) and Oanh is studying the zither (dàn tranh). The latter is an even iffier business, even if we were talented. But mostly it’s because we have a great product on our hands, one that’s undeservedly obscure and we are positioned to try to correct that.

How do you select the foods that you produce? As Vietnamese Americans, why have you decided to produce Japanese foods?
The common thread between tofu misozuke and all-natural nem chua (Vietnamese terrine) [this is a type of tangy fermented raw sausage usually sold at the cash register of a Viet market] is that they’re both food we’re absolutely in love with but could not get anymore. Given our love of travelling and our curiosity to try anything we encounter along the way, our cravings don’t really have an ethnic boundary. The fact that we could not find a recipe for either, even given Internet search tools and access to literature, spurred us on to our research. And once we had a great recipe, we feel almost a responsibility to get it out there. [Rau Om also sells nem chua.]

We love tofu misozuke, and even in the absence of critiquing elders, we are still focused on making tofu misozuke exactly as we had it in Japan, and being respectful of that tradition. So on our first farmers market, it was unbelievably satisfying that a Japanese-American woman stopped by, tasted tofu misozuke and her jaw just dropped. “Oh my God, I haven’t had this in decades. My Grandma used to make it... this is exactly like what she used to make.” We’ve had a lot more positive feedback from people of Japanese descent since then, but most of them were along the line of “I can’t believe tofu misozuke is this delicious when you age it for months instead of days.” To run into someone from the right region of Japan who knew exactly what we were striving for on the very first day was pretty awesome.

How do you foresee the future of Rau Om?
We’ve already seen our product earn its traditional place at an izakaya here in the Bay Area, and conquer a new niche by being featured on cheese shelves at a specialty shop and a grocery store. We’d like to see more of that. We’d like Rau Om to remain an artisanal producer of unique delicacies, but one that’s able to get those delicacies into the hands of food lovers all over the country, or the world even!

For more information, check the Rau Om website. If you get a chance, taste Rau Om’s tofu misozuke. Dang said that he’s doing a tasting at Rainbow natural food co-op in San Francisco late this week.

If you’ve heard of or tasted tofu misozuke, share your experience and thoughts!

Posted in Asian Food Culture, Asian food news, Asian Ingredients, Asian Tofu, Profiles in Food | Permalink

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Comments Tofu Misozuke: Q & A with Dang Vu of Rau Om Foods

Tofu is an extremely versatile food that can be manipulated in countless ways. A few months ago, Dang Vu emailed me about an unusual tofu product that he his wife, Oanh, had developed. The Vietnamese-American couple was selling tofu misozuke at Bay Area farmer’s markets, packaged under their company name, Rau Om (the name of a citrusy cuminy fresh herb also called ngo om; see the Viet herb primer for more info).

I’d read about the Japanese preserved “tofu cheese” in Elizabeth Andoh’s Washoku cookbook and seen it in Tofu Hyaku Chin, a 1782 bestseller in Japan. Alas, I hadn’t tasted it yet. It the world of Asian tofu, tofu no miso-zuke (how Elizabeth spelled it) is somewhat esoteric stuff. That is, a Japanese market or restaurant isn’t likely to have it.

I tried Rau Om’s tofu misozuke and found its meaty creaminess to be pleasant. Then I wondered why and how someone was introducing this rare tofu product to the Bay Area market. So I asked Dang, 32, to tell me a bit more about their background and endeavor.

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