Christina Chaey writes a lovely Substack Gentle Foods about using cooking to take care of yourself. Her recipes are for the kinds of foods you want to eat over and over — buttery cabbage noodles, beans and greens, cucumber kimchi. I’ve been making her chia pudding with oats and maple syrup all week, and it inspired Friday’s recipe for Chia Oatmeal Pancakes.
Certain people have a way of talking about food that just makes you want to eat it immediately, and I felt this throughout our tofu conversation. I already love tofu and use it similarly, as a sort of default protein that goes along with any vegetable (or I pan-fry it in slabs, sprinkle with salt and pepper and plenty of nutritional yeast, and keep it in the fridge for snacking throughout the day). I want to seek out soft tofu stews now though, and explore more textural variety.
I pressed Christina on her use of the word “lazy” when she describes her cooking, because it initially sounded self-critical to me, but on the other hand the way she embraces the lazy in her cooking is kind of liberating. It’s good to hear that someone who’s obviously a very good cook doesn’t always do things the “right” way at home. But I can also understand why she wants to communicate the proper ways to do things through her recipes, so that readers have the agency to make choices for themselves. It’s a thoughtful approach to the way people actually use recipes, which is always going to be out of your control as a recipe writer, but can set people up with the best information to make something delicious.
Most often what I’m cooking is tofu and a vegetable, stir-fried with a very simple sauce, and I eat it over rice. I coat the pressed and cubed tofu with cornstarch and salt and toss it, cook that in hot oil and fry it on all sides until it's crisp, then I take it out and stir-fry my vegetable, add the tofu, add the sauce and that's it. To me that is always going to be good no matter what. No matter what sauce, no matter what vegetable, that’s what is comfort to me.
I feel like I came of age professionally in the age of tofu. When I started working in food media in 2014/15, it wasn’t something you’d commonly find in the pages of Bon Appétit, which is where I worked. My editor-in-chief didn’t really get it. Then 2017-2018 was this time when I saw an explosion of tofu recipes gaining prominence in mainstream food media. The most prominent style of cooking would be “crispy tofu.” (Which I put in quotation marks because that's not an accurate descriptor. It's not crispy, or it doesn't stay crispy once you sauce it up.) So I was exposed to this explosion of tofu recipes and at a certain point I just got into this rhythm where it was as much about the convenience of not having to think about what to cook as it was about the fact that it tastes good. If I really need to turn my brain down to low for the night, that's what I cook.
There is something nice about the fact that you don't really need to cook it to a specific temperature. It’s flexible and forgiving and it goes with everything. I think some people consider that boring or see it as bland or not something that can stand on its own. And I couldn't agree less. I think it's a star. It allows for so much expression and it's a perfect partner, especially for a nice simple vegetable.
Kate: Did you eat tofu this way growing up?
I ate tofu multiple times a week my whole life growing up, but we never really ate it in the way I prepare it now. There's not a big culture of frying tofu in Korean cuisine the way you might find it in other Asian cuisines. Koreans lean into the softness. For me the ultimate tofu luxury food is Korean Sundubu. It's a fiery gochugaru-based broth and it's got a whole block of silken tofu that bubbles in that hot broth and it's flavored with all kinds of things — a little bit of beef, mixed seafood, mushrooms. They come out in these clay pots and they're fiercely bubbling. The whole point is to enjoy the beautiful melt-on-the-tongue quality of the silken tofu, which is a perfect match and foil for the heat of the broth.
It’s not that common to make at home. Although there are these kits that Leanne and I are obsessed with, that are basically a package of tofu and a sauce packet. They're sold by BCD which is a chain of Sundubu restaurants. You just heat up the tofu with a tiny bit of water. You can do it in any old pan. And it's great because if I have one of those packets around, it feels like a vehicle for random vegetables, like half a zucchini or a handful of spinach. It's a catch-all. For me that's the beauty of this kind of instant food, it’s such a pleasant way to eat the vegetables you don't have enough of to do something with.
K: Are there any types of tofu or brands you recommend?
I usually just get the supermarket tofu. But I went to H-Mart in Long Island City for the first time this week, and there were three different refrigerated bays of tofu. There was Korean, Chinese and Japanese, it was so awesome. And there’s a brand called Bridge tofu at the Park Slope Food Co-op. I find its texture to be really pleasant — it's the right amount of firmness. I'm not huge on extra-firm tofu, I prefer firm and below. It's something about retaining a creamy or custody mouthfeel even when you're pressing and frying. I appreciate the contrast of crispy exterior with a softer center.
I'm really lazy about pressing it. Sometimes I'll open the package, drain off the water, and then just hold the block between my hands and take a gamble as to how tight I can squeeze without breaking it apart. And that'll be the extent of the pressing, to be honest. But if I am pressing — I used to do it with paper towels, which I always hated because of the waste of it. Now my favorite tofu accessory is a plain flour sack tea towel, with that almost mesh-like weave. It's the perfect consistency.
Right now I'm going through a huge miso and butter phase. I made tofu and broccoli with a miso butter sauce the other night and it was so good. It was enhanced with a touch of soy sauce and a tiny bit of sugar. Sugar or some kind of sweetness is an important element of that style of sauce, along with acid, so often it's a mix of sweetener plus acid like rice vinegar plus umami salt, like soy sauce or oyster sauce. And then some water, which helps give it a less gloopy consistency. If I'm really lazy I put everything directly into the skillet and force it all to meld, but otherwise I mix it in a bowl and pour it over and cook until the sauce coats everything nicely. Sometimes I finish with a little bit of lime juice or rice vinegar to keep the brightness.
K: I’m interested in the way you describe your own cooking as “lazy,” since what you’re making isn’t really that lazy, especially by other people’s standards. Can you tell me more about what you mean by that?
There's a whole set of instructions I would never put to paper when writing a recipe to give to someone else. For my recipe writing self, there’s a proper way. In the example of the miso butter sauce, I’d say to dissolve the miso in some sort of liquid in a bowl before adding it to the pan of tofu and vegetables so that the miso doesn't get weird and clumpy and [unevenly coat the tofu]. That's not something I desire for anyone to experience at the hand of a recipe that I write.
That being said, it's not how I behave a lot of the time, but I think the trade-off is that I know that probably the miso is gonna get weird, but I'm okay with that. You know what I mean? It's hard to convey personal standards within the context of a standardized recipe, even though I suspect that a lot of people would be actually fine. Like, if it's good enough for me, is it going to be good enough for you? I don't know. But when I write recipes, I don't want to find out.
My hope is that someone who is more experienced can read a recipe and make certain decisions for themselves. They can have their own agency and decide where they want to simplify. But for someone who is less experienced, I want them to still have that “proper way.”
Like just this morning, I was making pancakes and I measured out buttermilk into a measuring glass. And I was adding egg and melted butter and other stuff and if I were writing a recipe I would instruct you to whisk those things in a bowl. But for myself, I’m 100% dumping everything into the glass even though there’s like 1cm of headspace left. So I’m sitting there stupidly really carefully whisking in the tiniest circles to make sure it doesn't spill out.
K: Would you want to know about the ways other people cook at home that aren’t the proper way?
Yeah, I find them interesting, but they inherently can't exist in public on forums like [Instagram]. Things that feel like secret behaviors.
K: Anything else you’ve been making with tofu recently?
I've recently been experimenting with blended applications for tofu. Like I have all these visions of tofu mousses or puddings or tofu ricotta.
K: In the 90s, I feel like all the vegetarian cookbooks had recipes like that.
Well, I think I’m having my own personal 90s white person hippie tofu moment, where I'm just like, Oh, great idea. Maybe because I didn't eat those things when they were happening, but they sound intriguing and good. And now with summer coming, I feel like it would be fun to experiment with no-bake tofu desserts.
What I’m Cooking
The chia pancakes I mentioned above. I also made a nice scallion oil noodle dish with a mix of dried hand-cut noodles and Hodo Yuba (another form of tofu that we talked about in this conversation). I added julienned carrots and baby bok choy for extra veggies and plenty of sesame oil and toasted sesame seeds.
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