FW: SF Gate: The hidden world of tofu/Local producers offer a boggling array - from delicate and custardlike to chewy and crisp

[Guest guest]

Interesting tofu article! Who knew?!

Doh

 

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This article was sent to you by someone who found it on SF Gate.

The original article can be found on SFGate.com here:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/10/30

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Wednesday, October 30, 2002 (SF Chronicle)

The hidden world of tofu/Local producers offer a boggling array - from

delicate and custardlike to chewy and crisp

Olivia Wu, Chronicle Staff Writer

 

 

" Yep. I grow 'em, " the farmer drawled. I was standing under a slow, summer

sun in rural North Carolina among rows of undulating green bushes. I was

elated. A foreign student homesick for tofu and soybeans, I had hit pay

dirt.

But no. He let me know, with unshakeable certainty, that his crop would be

sent away for industrial use - " steering wheels, " he said with relish, and

livestock feed.

Surrounded by a sea of soybeans, I could not find a one that was edible.

That was 30 years ago, when soy beans were the second largest farm crop in

the country but nobody knew about tofu, the main food produced from soy.

Today,

U.S. farmers grow the largest crop of soybeans in the world and exports

half of it. Three percent of the 70 million acres grown is made into food.

That 3 percent is a huge leap from the dismal consumption rate that

confronted me that summer. Now, soy milk products are stacked onto the

shelves of every mainstream supermarket in the United States.

The growth is fortified in large part because Americans have come to

realize that soy milk and the products made from it are nutritious.

Earlier this year, the Food and Drug Administration allowed health claims

on labels of soy products stating that soy protein, in a diet low in

saturated fat, can lower total cholesterol, as well as LDL, or bad,

cholesterol. In addition, research suggests that soy may lower the risk of

chronic diseases including some cancers and osteoporosis, and can ease

menopausal symptoms.

Soy milk sales alone grew by 2,000 percent this year, largely because Dean

Foods, the biggest dairy conglomerate in America, bought out White Wave,

makers of Silk, a popular brand of soy milk products.

The move clearly signals that Dean Foods is " buying for the future, " says

William Shurtleff, co-author of the seminal 1976 " Book of Tofu, " and the

founder of the Soyfoods Center in Lafayette.

While the dairy shelves in groceries are teeming with the ersatz soy milk,

cheeses and other faux dairy, a separate and parallel tradition of

soy-milk foods thrives in Chinese and other Asian traditions. Soy milk and

its subsequent product, tofu, are a food in a category by itself - not as

an alternative to animal food. And tofu offers multiple, even infinite,

variants.

Tofu morphs into a whole range of products in much the same way that, in

many Western countries, cow's milk is made into fresh and aged cheeses.

The two processes are similar and so are the roles they play in Eastern

and Western diets. In a very fundamental way, tofu has anchored nutrition

and cuisine in the East, just as dairy milk has in the West.

" The parallels between the two are nothing short of amazing, " says

Shurtleff. " It's astonishing that you could get from a plant what you get

out of an animal. " Some 19th centery Western observers in China even give

soy the moniker of " the cow of China. "

American tofu-makers, with the help of new technology, have created soy

milk that tastes and feels in the mouth more like cow's milk, and put

their energies toward making dairy-like yogurt, cream, cheese and ice

cream.

They also focus largely on one product, firm tofu, because the American

dietary goal is protein and that protein - usually a hunk of meat - takes

the center of the plate. They research various ways to flavor that one

variety of tofu. Baked, firm tofu is sold with peanut, teriyaki and Thai

flavors, for example.

On the other hand, Asian cultures make endless varieties of tofu, much

like American and European cheesemakers make a variety of cheeses.

Everything from young, bland types such as ricotta or cottage cheeses to

the aged, highly fermented types such as the blue cheeses, such as

Gorgonzola, have cousins in the Chinese family of tofu products. The

tender Chinese tofu " blossom " and or the Japanese kinugoshi tofu are the

youngest tofu products, sort of like bland cottage cheese or fresh

ricotta. Older, fermented and brined fuyu with its intense flavor -

something you only eat a tiny bit of - is akin to an aged blue cheese.

Like cheese, the variations are great. There is silken tofu (dohua),

springy, protein-dense noodle-shaped products (gansi) and nearly

translucent dried sheets of tofu that are used like phyllo dough.

Shurtleff, who had cataloged eight major types of tofu products in Japan,

was blown away by what he found in China.

" I saw types of tofu I had never seen before, more than anywhere else in

the world, " he says. " The inventiveness and entrepreneurial sense of the

Chinese, as well as the large geographic spread of the country, gave rise

to a wide spectrum of tofu types and the cuisine. "

Tofu, pronounced " dofu " in Chinese, has become a standard against which

other food is measured in Chinese cuisine and culture. " Bean " (do in

Chinese) and " curd " (fu) are both words that connote great value. Any

extremely tender food, for example, is likened to tofu. " Almond tofu " is a

common food that contains no tofu, but is a jelled, cold dessert served

with fruit, for example.

Central to tofu's versatility is an often neutral, albeit subtle and

fresh, umami taste. Until the 1990s, when technology made longer

shelf-life possible, tofu was best bought fresh, on the day it was made.

East Asians value that freshness as Europeans value fresh bread. Great

players in high Chinese cuisine use tofu just as prominent chefs in the

West continually produce dishes using bread or eggs or dairy (see sidebar

on Chef Nei' and his recipes).

Tofu is stir-fried, deep-fried, braised, poached, and cooked in soups with

as many ingredients and flavors as there exist in the Chinese culinary

constellation, often combined with some animal product for flavor.

American scientists only discovered in soy's available, easily digestible,

low-on-the-food-chain protein in the 19th century. In contrast, soy was

first mentioned in Chinese historical documents in 1100 B.C., says

Shurtleff, who is collaborating on a history of soy with a noted Chinese

scholar. The first mention of tofu was made a thousand years later.

The method of making tofu hasn't changed much since it was first created,

although scale of production has. Tofu is made through a process of

coagulating the proteins in soy milk, just like dairy milk. That creates

curds,

which are separated from the watery whey. In cheese making, rennet is the

curdling agent. In the tofu process, calcium sulfate or magnesium chloride

(also known as nigari) is used.

After the soybean is soaked, ground and squeezed for its white liquid, soy

milk is morphed creatively into products that can be likened to fresh and

aged cheeses. Soymilk and tofu look, act, respond and support nutrition as

milk and cheese do.

As in the dairy process, the curds are skimmed off and left to drain and

compact while the curds are pressed to form the tofu, which is why the

Chinese and Japanese producers marketed tofu early on as " bean curd. " Not

surprisingly,

it didn't catch on, for despite whatever Miss Muffet ate while she sat on

the tuffet, neither the " bean " word or the " curds and whey " words connoted

anything attractive to Americans.

In the Bay Area, many Asian tofu makers are enjoying a steady growth in

business, for example the Lin family of Taiwan, which owns China Tofu in

Hayward. Lin Po Chi, 39, and his brother oversee the manufacture of

20-plus kinds of fresh, traditional tofu products at the family factory

which their father started. " We make exactly the same kind of tofu we make

in Taiwan, " he says.

The Lins are clearly global tofu makers and have almost completed the

circle of tofu making, East and West. " My father, brother and I go back

and forth between the Taiwan business and here, " he says. The Hayward

factory processes more than 2,000 pounds of soybeans a day, and supplies

local Asian food stores and some restaurants with daily deliveries. China

Tofu also sells loose tofu products in bulk from the factory. Using

American grown, food-grade beans that aren't exported (50 percent of U.S.

soy is exported, mostly to China), he makes the kind of soy milk and tofu

in the Chinese style, which tastes like a plant product rather than a

dairy product, with a clean, sweet, fresh flavor, which the Chinese call

xian, meaning with umami characteristics.

What remains may be for mainstreamers to discover Chinese and other Asian

styles of tofu and the cuisine that goes hand in hand with it.

If U.S. culture really adopts soy foods and tofu, it would allow Shurtleff

a quiet, Zen-like chuckle as he sits in his den of 65,000 pieces of soy

data and artifacts. The good-for-the-planet/good-for-me/good flavor point

of view would spread worldwide. " What the U.S. does, the rest of the world

will do. "

Take that, McDonald's