Cantonese Smothered Tofu (锅烧豆腐)

Plus, one of our (earlier) primers on sauces

Today, I wanted to share with you how to make a great and relatively newer tofu dish from the Guangdong province – wosiu tofu. It’s basically just some fried silken tofu topped with a thick sauce, so I like to translate this as “smothered tofu”.

Now, there’s really not too much too this dish, so in light of the fact that this is, well, covered in sauce… I figured it’d be a decent time to go off on a slight tangent and talk a bit about Chinese sauces as well.

Cantonese Smothered Tofu

So this is a relatively newer dish, so this recipe is based off of a version that we like from one of our favorite restaurants where we live (Shunde, Guangdong). They’re a bit unique in that they add a bit of crunch to their sauce in the form of carrot and beans, which we quite like.

Ingredients

1. Firm Silken Tofu (石膏豆腐) -or- soft tofu (嫩豆腐), two blocks, ~500g. So right, the go-to tofu in Cantonese cuisine is silken tofu, which’s made using gypsum as the coagulant. It’s a bit smoother than regular tofu, which’s made using nigari. Abroad, IIRC this’s sold as ‘firm silken tofu’, as ‘silken tofu’ often seems to refer to tofu pudding (i.e. douhua). If you can’t find it, use a bog-standard soft tofu (i.e. a nigari tofu)… will still work.

2. Coating for the deep-frying the tofu: 1 egg, ½ tbsp AP flour (中筋面粉); plus more flour for coating.

3. Dried Shiitake Mushroom (冬菇), 1. This’ll help form the base of our sauce – we’ll be mincing the reconstituted mushroom as well as using the soaking liquid (which’s awesome).

4. Optional, for crunch: carrot, ~2 inches; longbean (豆角), 1 or green bean, 3-4.

5. For the sauce: stock, enough to top off one cup; slurry of 1 tbsp cornstarch (生粉) mixed with 2 tbsp water; ~1tbsp liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍酒), ~1 tsp toasted sesame oil (麻油). We’ll need one cup of liquid total here – for us, we got about a third of a cup of soaking liquid from the mushroom, so we used 2/3 of a cup of stock here. Re stock, there’s a detailed discussion on your options re stock in the “How to make a Qian” section below. The TL;DR there is that if you don’t feel like making your own Chinese stock, you can alternatively use Chinese stock concentrate (~1 tsp), or a Western supermarket box stock (so long as its unroasted and doesn’t have too much of a hit of herbs).

6. Scallion, ~2-3 springs. Sliced, to finish.

Process

Ok, so high level overview here. Cut your tofu into ~8 pieces per block, then give them a blanch in hot salted water for ~10 minutes or so. Pat them dry, coat with egg/flour, deep fry for ~3 minutes. Make your sauce according to the “how to make a qian” section below – we’ll be frying some crunchy vegetable at first, then use a combination of mushroom soaking liquid and stock for our liquid.

1. Reconstitute the shiitake mushroom with cool water, at least ~3 hours or alternatively overnight. Give the shiitake mushroom a cool water soak. Three hours is good but if eight’s easier logistically (e.g. overnight, or in the morning before work), do that.

2. Cut the tofu into eight pieces each. Slice the block of tofu horizontally, then cut down in each direction to get eight pieces.

3. Add ½ tsp of salt to a pot of boiling water, then shut off the heat and carefully add in the tofu. Let the tofu sit for at least ten minutes, or until you’re ready to cook. Blanching your tofu like this in salt water accomplishes two things here: first, it’ll slightly firm up the tofu so it’s less likely to crumble on you. Second, it’ll also help pre-cook the tofu so that it doesn’t need as long of a fry.

4. Prep the shiitake mushroom, the carrot, the longbean/green bean, and the scallion. Squeeze the mushroom dry of any excess moisture, then snip off the stem, and finally dice. Peel the carrot, dice. Slice the longbean or green bean into ~1/2 cm slices, slice the scallion.

5. Remove the tofu from the hot water, and toss on a dry towel. Pat the tofu dry.

6. Dust the tofu pieces with AP flour. This will help the coating stick.

7. Crack an egg, sift in the ½ tbsp AP flour. Super light batter here, just to give a bit of fluffiness. Beat the egg thorough un til no stray strands of egg white remain, sift in the flour, mix thorough to ensure no clumps.

8. Get a pot of oil up to ~175C, and simultaneously begin to give the tofu a flip or two in the egg batter, then drop it in the oil. This coating’s quite thin, so basically as soon as you’re done coating it it needs to go straight in the pot. So work through these one or two at a time.

9. Fry the tofu for ~3 minutes in all, giving it a flip halfway through. Now because we’ll be putting the tofu pieces in one by one, by the time you get all of them in your very first pieces’ll be almost ready to come out. You don’t need to get obsessive and pull them out in the exact order you put them in or anything… once the tofu’s golden brown and obviously buoyant, it’s ready to come out. So just use your own judgement.

10. Make the sauce. Ok, so once you’re done deep-frying, dip out most of the oil… leaving ~1 tbsp. Take a paper towel and wipe it all down, and you should be good to fry. Then with the flame on medium,

• Minced mushroom, carrot, and longbean/green bean, in. Fry for ~1 minute or until starting to get slightly softened.

• Pour one tablespoon liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing wine over your spatula and around the sides of the wok, to let it sizzle and quickly reduce away.

• Pour in the shiitake mushroom soaking liquid/stock mixture. Bring it up to a boil.

• Slowly drizzle in your slurry, stirring constantly until thickened.

• Shut off the heat, drizzle in the toasted sesame oil.

Technique: How to Make a Qian

Ok, now there’s two basic ‘sauces’ in Chinese cooking: zhi (汁), which is a sauce that sorta takes the star of the show (think sweet and sour), and qian (芡), which I guess would be most similar in function to something like a pan sauce in Western cooking. The former’s really tough to make generalizations for, so we’ll focus on the latter.

The very most basic qian is simply stock, slurry, and seasoning (salt, sugar, maybe MSG, maybe some other stuff). The basic ratio is (by volume) roughly one part starch to fifteen parts liquid – though you have some flexibility there. For a thinner sauce, you can go up to or even in excess of 1:20, and for a thicker sauce you can go down to 1:10 (in our earliest recipes here we were kind of guilty of overly thick sauces).

The Slurry

Now, different starches’ll behave differently in your qian. We generally use cornstarch in our recipes (and by extension our house), simply because it’s… widely available outside of China. Ease of international replication and all that. Cornstarch totally works and is also extensively used in homes here in China (gotten into a number of arguments online on that subject haha), but… isn’t the absolute best starch for qian.

If you can get your hands on some… potato starch (土豆淀粉), tapioca starch (木薯淀粉), or cassava starch all are preferable. Why? Well… I’m not totally sure why this is, but cornstarch tends to thicken comparatively slowly. Especially if you’re eyeballing the slurry (more on that in a second), it can be quite easy to overthicken the sauce with cornstarch if you’re not careful. Also, for whatever reason, cornstarch just doesn’t hold as well at room temperature. As a historical aside, before the Columbian exchange, the traditional starches used were Water Chestnut starch (in the south of China) and Mungbean starch (in the north of China), and those tend to work quite well too. Nothing to obsess too hard over though.

For the slurry itself, we usually employ a more water-y slurry to make it easier to pour – one part starch to 2-3 parts water (by volume). Restaurants tend to use thicker slurries… one of our restauranteur-focused cookbooks specifies 1 part starch to 0.6 parts water, which also feels about right.

Stock

Then, for the stock, you have some choices. For a quick primer on Chinese stocks, check out the old post I made on the subject here.

• Simple Chinese Homestyle Stock. Would work great and would be most similar to what you’d get outside at restaurants.

• Cantonese Superior Stock. Hey, it’d taste good, but might feel a little… rich… depending on the dish. For the deep-fried tofu above, I personally wouldn’t use this unless I needed to finish up a batch. Generally used for fancier dishes.

• Vegetarian Stock. For vegetarian dishes, obviously. I actually haven’t shared a vegetarian stock recipe here yet, so I’ll post one below here for completeness sake.

• The soaking liquid from dried shiitake mushrooms/shrimp/scallops. Three awesome glutamate-rich ingredients, you can use the soaking liquid in much the same way you can stock. You can also combine the soaking liquid with stock or water, which’s what we did with the tofu recipe above.

• Water, plus stock concentrate -or- bouillon powder. Like in the West, stock concentrate tends to be a superior product to bouillon powder. We like using a stock concentrate that’s actually scallop stock concentrate, but the standard bottle of Knorr chicken stock concentrate also works. Use, let’s say… a teaspoon of stock concentrate (or a half teaspoon of bouillon powder) per cup of liquid. If you're using this sort of approach, it's a nice idea to add either some of the soaking liquid from those dried umami-rich ingredients and/or some seasoning with a bit of flavor to it, e.g. soy sauce or oyster sauce.

• Western stocks. Could you use a Western stock here? Eh… sure, provided it’s unroasted. Or maybe roasted would be tasty too, I dunno… it’d definitely give a different flavor though. Even with unroasted stocks though, here’s the thing – Western stocks tend to be much heavier in aromatics and other seasonings than Chinese stocks. If your stock has a really heavy hit of thyme, let’s say, it might not be the best choice in a Chinese recipe. Western boxed chicken stocks tend to be really light on that front though, so… use your own judgement.

There’s obviously other choices here, and there’s a million different Chinese stocks. Hell, we’ve even seen recipes with milk-based qian, or those that squeeze out the liquid from pounded leafy greens to make it uh… green. But the above (minus the Western stocks, of course) are what we bump into the most.

Seasoning

So from this base, there’s… a bunch of stuff you can add in. Salt, sugar, MSG, and (maybe) some white pepper powder would be classic. Alternatively could fry some aromatics (any combination of ginger/garlic/scallion whites), hit it with a bit of Shaoxing wine, then use that as a base. You could add soy sauce, oyster sauce, toasted sesame oil… hell I’ve even seen one with Worcestershire sauce included.

How to Make it

Absurdly simple, feels weird even writing down a recipe.

There’s just one thing to know though – if you look at a lot of recipes for Chinese dishes online, you’ll find that the sauce is ‘pre-mixed’ then just thickened in a pot. Can you do it that way? Sure, absolutely. Lots of homecooks in China do it that way – it’s definitely handy… and hell, when we first started this project that was usually the method we did. That said, we now (usually) prefer a more modular approach now, because (1) it’s much clearer what’s going on at a higher level (instead of just mixing a bunch of shit together) and (2) it gives you greater control during cooking. You also see it a bit more in restaurants, so yeah.

1. Optional: fry aromatics until fragrant, swirl in a touch (~1 tbsp) Shaoxing wine over your spatula and around the sides of the wok. If using.

2. Add the stock/liquid, get it up to a boil.

3. Add any optional seasoning. If using. Taste.

4. Slowly drizzle in your slurry, stirring constantly. This is the point where you’re going to need to trust your senses. In our recipes, we test how much slurry we put in to make things easier for you, but when we’re cooking ourselves we basically always eyeball this. If you’re using something that thickens quicker than cornstarch (e.g. potato starch), pour in a thin stream while stirring until it’s thickened to your liking. If you’re using cornstarch, pour it in bit by bit, because cornstarch takes at least ~10 seconds to do its thing.

5. Shut off the heat. Add in the toasted sesame oil, if using… that’s always to finish.

So yeah, basically a pan sauce minus fond, plus a couple optional seasonings. Nothing too complicated here.

Cantonese Superior Vegetarian Stock (素上汤)

So yeah… there’s a few different vegetarian stocks in Chinese cuisine, so I figured that a good one to show’d be a super versatile mushroom based sort from Guangdong. It’s dirt simple to whip up and (where we live at least) often ends up being cheaper to make than stock. Perfect for cooking for vegetarians, and easy to make non-veg too.

I will say that if you’re drinking this straight up as a soup, you’ll probably find it less exciting than something like Japanese dashi or similar Chinese daikon/kelp based broths. This soup excels when used as, well, stock – something that you can use can use in sauces, as the base for braises, and so forth.

There's also a separate video here if you want.

Ingredients

Ok, so for the most part what we’re looking at is (roughly) equal parts dried soybean, shelled chestnut, and dried shiitake mushrooms by volume. So once you get the hang this, know that this doesn’t need to be an exact science… eyeballing is totally the way to go.

1. Dried Shiitake Mushrooms (冬菇), 25g -or- a half/half mix of dried shiitake mushrooms and dried straw mushrooms. So right, we used dried shiitake mushrooms here for ease of international replication BUT I did want to include a quick aside on straw mushrooms. For the most traditional Cantonese vegetarian stocks, they’ll use half straw mushrooms – mushrooms that grow on dried rice reeds. They were discovered by Buddhist monks in Shaoguan (northern Guangdong) and have this awesome fragrance. The dried version of the straw mushrooms can be annoying to source even here in Guangdong these days, so don’t pull your hair out trying to source them – but if you happen to have access to some great dried mushrooms that’re local to your area, totally feel free to use half those, half shiitake… it’d still be true to the essence of the dish here.

2. Shelled chestnut (栗子肉), 80g. Or about ~6-7 chestnuts (the weight there is for the shelled ones). Gives the soup some body.

3. Dried soybeans (黄豆), 100g. Soybeans help give the stock depth. There’s actually two different routes you can go here – dried soybeans, or fresh soybean sprouts. We went with the former (again, ease of international replication), but if you can get your hands on soyabean sprouts, feel free to swap those in instead (let’s double up there though… let’s say… 200g?). Dried soybean works great but they’ve definitely got some grassy notes that you gotta balance against (the sprouts have no such issues), Note that unlike mungbean sprouts, which’re the bog-standard “bean sprout” in the west, soybean sprouts have a natural umami to them… so definitely don’t use mungbean sprouts in a stock unless you wanna be disappointed.

4. Rock sugar (冰糖), 5g -or- ¼ tsp granulated sugar. We’ll finish this off with a touch of sugar to balance the grassiness of the soybean.

5. Optional: white peppercorns, ~20. This soup’s largely unseasoned – up to you if you want to toss in peppercorn or not. If you have it on hand, cool; if not, I wouldn’t stress.

6. Optional: dried red dates (红枣). This’s another ingredient that’s sometimes used to balance the soybean – I’ve seen some recipes call for like a whole handful. It makes the soup a bit on the sweet side though, and I’d rather stick with sugar for the sake of control when seasoning. But if you happen to already have dried red dates handy, there’s no harm in tossing one or two in, then doing the sugar to taste.

Oh, and four liters of water, too.

If you want to make it non-veg, you can also toss in a knob of Jinhua (or Iberico) ham and/or a few dried scallops. Helps add a further layer of depth.

Process

First off, if you’re used to cooking western stocks, note that Chinese stocks instead (1) cook things at a heavier boil and (2) make use of reduction.

So high level overview here: reconstitute the soybeans and mushrooms in cool water overnight, toss everything in a pot with cool water, lightly boil everything until reduced by half, season and strain. Simple, yeah?

1. Reconstitute the dried mushrooms and dried soybeans with cool water for at least ~3 hours, or overnight. Separate bowls – we’ll be making use of the shiitake mushroom’s soaking liquid, but not the soybean’s. Be sure to leave a couple inches of water above the mushroom/beans in order to give them room to expand into.

2. Transfer everything except the sugar to a pot of ~4L of cool water. Strain the shiitake mushroom soaking liquid into the pot as well. Shiitake mushroom soaking liquid is awesome – super underrated ingredient. Hell, you can even use the soaking liquid straight up… IMO it’s better than stock – makes for a badass mushroom risotto. Note that if you happen to be using half some-other-sort-of-dried-mushroom, taste your soaking liquid before mindlessly tossing it in. E.g. those straw mushrooms I was talking about? Their soaking liquid’s a bit too strong and has some bitterness to it.

3. Get the pot up to a boil. As it starts to boil, you’ll notice there’ll be a slight bit of foam from the proteins of the soybeans. Skim it, don’t skim it, up to you. While not as cloudy as some, this stock won’t be overly clear anyhow… barring you going all consommé on it and using an egg white raft or some shit.

4. Swap your flame to medium/medium-low and let it bubble away until reduced by half, ~3 hours. The reduction’ll concentrate the flavors.

5. Season with sugar, then strain. Vegetarian stock, done.

Note on what to do with all those leftovers.

Ok, so that’s a good quantity of beans and such that’re leftover. Definitely don’t toss them – they’re good to eat. Perfect for a quick kinda ‘fuck it, everything in the pot’ stew.

Like, the other day when I was testing this I whipped up a bit of a quick stew using the leftovers that was way more delicious than it had any right to be. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to just scribble something down to give you an idea so that the stuff doesn’t go to waste. Note that this obviously isn’t authentic to… anything. Just something we slapped together up and enjoyed on a Wednesday.

Grab a couple of your leftover shiitake mushrooms and finely dice. Ditto with a couple cloves of garlic, ~1 inch or so ginger, and the white portion of let’s say ~4 scallion. I also diced up a touch of Jinhua ham and tossed in the very bottom of my XO sauce bottle. Fry those in until lightly browned, then add in an equal amount of flour to make a simple roux. Fry for a minute or two until blonde, then add in your leftovers, Shaoxing wine (~1/4 cup), light soy sauce (~1/4 cup), dark soy sauce (~1 tbsp), slab sugar (~1-2 square inch chunk), a cinnamon stick, a small splash of fish sauce, and enough water (and maybe a slug or two of the veg stock we just made) to submerge everything. Let it bubble for about 30 minutes or until thickened. If it’s not thick enough for you, hit it with a cornstarch slurry until it is. Season with MSG, optionally salt if its not salty enough, optionally sugar if its not sweet enough, optionally a touch of Chinkiang vinegar if its too sweet. Top with the green part of some scallion. Eat with some crusty bread.

(I know that was a crap ‘recipe’, but… yeah. Just an idea for you.)