'The hidden world of tofu', today's Chronicle

[Guest guest]

The hidden world of tofu

Local producers offer a boggling array - from delicate and custardlike to chewy

and crisp

Olivia Wu, Chronicle Staff Writer

Wednesday, October 30, 2002

©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.

URL:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2002/10/30/FD8067\

5.DTL

 

" 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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