Home Doufu - 家常豆腐

This is one of the dishes Xiaoyu prepared when he invited me over for some serious chinese cooking. The recipe is loosely based on a dish called Ba Zhen Dou Fu Bao - 八珍豆腐煲. The name means a hotpot with 8 (Ba) ingredients (including Doufu), they are "shell meat", "squid", "sea cucumber", "chicken chest" "bamboo shoot", "abalone", "mushroom".
Xiaoyu did a simplified version that's Szechuan style and easier on the budget ;-)

Ingredients:
500 gr dofu (from the north)
100 gr pork (in cubes of about 1 cm)
100 gr sugar snaps
spring onion (in thin rings)
100 gr shiitaki (sliced)
3 cm ginger (sliced)
1 pak choi (in pieces of about 5 cm)
2 tbs secret sauce (see picture)
30 gr corn starch (or tapioca starch)
1/2 tbs shaohsing rice wine
20 gr salt
2 tbs light soy sauce
2 tbs water

Our secret ingredient is the bottom right package

• Mix the pork cubes with 30 gr cornstarch (or tapioca starch) & 1/2 tbs rice wine.
• Steam the dofu for about 10 minutes to make it firmer. Cut it in slices of about 5 x 3.5 x 1.5cm. Fry the slices of dofu until they are nice and gold. Take the dofu out of the wok and pour out most of the oil. Absorb some water out of the dofu with kitchen tissue.
• Stir fry the pork for a minute or two. Add the shiitaki, and stir fry some more. Add the dofu, the secret sauce and the water. Add the other ingredients except for the pak choi, and let everything cook for about 5 minutes. Finally add the pak choi and let everything cook for about another minute. The pak choi should keep it's lovely green color
• We didn't have it, but ideally add some slices of carrot to enrich the color palet

Burning hands on steamed dofu	Frying the dofu

Our dish is in the right top	The finished dish in the right bottom

I asked Xiaoyu for this dish after we ate it at Tai Wu, and it was super delicious! However, it didn't taste much like the dish at Tai Wu, as Xiaoyu cooks Szechuan style, and Tai Wu is more Kantonese style. (meaning that the dish at Tai Wu is more sweet, and the one at Xiaoyu's is more spicy).

The dofu should be the soft version, aka north dofu. The texture of chinese dofu is different than the Japanese tofu, and the soft version has a more sour taste to it. The best is to get it fresh from the Chinese store (I actually like the one from the toko in my street best. That one I like to eat even raw). Getting the right dofu is really key to cooking with dofu. Sounds kinda obvious now, but before I started my dofu mission abou a year ago (I was determined to find out why a quarter of the world population likes something that nasty ;-) ) I didn't even know there were different kinds, let alone how to deal with them.