As part of my goal to both widen the array of what I eat and have material to provide to this site, I tested out a random dish for dinner. It was actually my boyfriend, Luke, who gave me the challenge that led to this specific dish. We were in the grocery store and he asked me if I could find us something “new and exciting” to eat.
We were in the produce aisle, which is also where the tofu lives. Being a culturally elitist nerd, I whipped out my iPhone. I have the Big Oven app, which allows you to search for recipes based on keyword or ingredient. I searched on “tofu,” and a recipe for Memphis-style barbeque tofu came up. Since Luke loves barbeque and I love barbeque sauce, it sounded like the perfect recipe to try.
While I’m a vegetarian, Luke is very much not. He is, however, adventurous when it comes to trying new things, so he was all for giving this recipe a shot. I decided to serve it with a bunch of more familiar sides, so if it turned out terribly, there would at least be mashed potatoes to fall back on.
The downside of the recipe is that it calls for a lot of ingredients. The upside is that with the exception of chili sauce and molasses, we already had everything in our pantry. We also didn’t have vegetarian Worcestershire sauce, but neither did the grocery store, so I used soy sauce instead.
The cooking process also took a lot longer than I thought it would: you need to bake the tofu for at least an hour, turning it every fifteen minutes to get it to the chewy consistency that you want. I have a real aversion to soft tofu, so after about 45 minutes or so I took it out and dumped it all into a frying pan and fried it for a few minutes, just to make sure I got all the water out. This step is probably completely unnecessary and was just a product of my weird food issues.
I didn’t really make any substitutions, other than the aforementioned soy sauce. I also nixed the onion because I hate them. I added a little Frank’s Red Hot as well, to cut the sweetness and add more of a vinegar taste. I served the tofu with Amy’s organic baked beans, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob and cornbread.
As a whole, the meal itself was a success. It was a perfect Sunday night dinner of comfort food. As a stand-alone dish, however, I’m not so sure about the barbeque tofu. While the sauce turned out really well, at the end of the day, it just tasted like tofu covered in sauce. I often have this problem when I cook with tofu — it doesn’t actually take on the flavor of whatever you’re cooking it in, leaving you with the sense that you’re just trying to cover it up.
I thought the problem was that the recipe didn’t allow for enough time for the sauce to soak into the tofu. I tested this in the most scientific way I know: leftovers. The next day I made some of the leftovers into sandwiches, and let me tell you: that was some good barbeque.
So my advice if you’re going to try this dish: either build in more time to let the tofu marinate in the barbeque sauce, or just look at it as a great excuse for leftovers.
Clacked by Kona Gallagher 
on Jan 26, 2009 @ 21:02 EST5EDT
