Tofu

• 1. Introduction

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  Tofu, the pale block of pressed soy curds, was traditionally laid out at graves in China for a curious reason. Legend held that ghosts had lost their chins and jaws, which left tofu as the only food soft enough for them to manage.

  Before refrigeration, the same food was usually sold only in winter. In warm months, a block left for more than a day would spoil.

  People have eaten tofu for more than 2,000 years. It is a traditional part of many East Asian and Southeast Asian kitchens, and Western cooks often use it in place of meat.

  Who first thought to curdle soy milk? How did a bland white block travel to Japan, the Philippines, France and the United States? And what actually happens inside a pot of soy milk when it turns solid?

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• 2. Contested Origins

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  Prince Liu An of Anhui province, who lived from 179 to 122 BC, is the man Chinese legend credits with inventing tofu. His is the most commonly held of three theories. Reliable sources from the Han dynasty are scarce, so nobody can confirm it. Chinese history also has a habit of crediting important inventions to important leaders.

  In 1960, a stone mural unearthed from an Eastern Han dynasty tomb gave the Han theory some support. Some scholars still argue that Han-era tofu was too rudimentary. In their view it lacked the firmness and taste to deserve the name.

  A slurry of boiled, ground soybeans mixed with impure sea salt is the setting for the second theory, which makes tofu an accident. Such salt would probably have carried calcium and magnesium compounds. Those compounds can curdle soy milk into a tofu-like gel.

  The third group of theories looks toward the Mongolians. During the Sui dynasty, from AD 581 to 618, the Chinese word rǔfǔ meant "milk curdled". It described dishes as thick as yogurt or soft cheese. The later word dòufu means "beans curdled". Supporters see an echo and suggest that Chinese cooks copied Mongolian ways of curdling milk. Nothing beyond academic speculation backs this up.

  Whoever deserves the credit, tofu did not become a popular food in China until the Song dynasty, which ran from 960 to 1279.

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• 3. Roads Out Of China

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  Zen Buddhist monks are credited with bringing tofu to Japan. The records are murky. Tofu and its method are thought to have arrived in the Nara period, from 710 to 794, but no clear documents survive. Tofu first appears on record in AD 965. A later document describes it served as an offering at the Kasuga Shrine in Nara in 1183.

  The first Japanese tofu is thought to have been hard, like the island tofu still made in Okinawa. Makers gradually found ways to produce a smooth texture, and modern silken tofu was born. By 1782, in the Edo period, a book called Tofu Hyakuchin listed 100 recipes for cooking it.

  Buddhism probably helped carry tofu even further. It is an important source of protein in the vegetarian diet of East Asian Buddhism, and its spread seems to have followed the religion. Some scholars believe it reached Vietnam in the 10th and 11th centuries. In the Ming dynasty, Li Shizhen described a method for making it in the Compendium of Materia Medica. Vietnam, Thailand and Korea each went on to build their own methods, textures and flavors.

  In Southeast Asia, the evidence is in the language. Chinese immigrants from Fujian province brought tofu with them, and many countries still use Min Nan Chinese words for it. Tāu-hū means soft tofu and tāu-koaⁿ means firm. Indonesia calls it tahu, while Malaysia and Singapore call it tauhu.

  Song dynasty Chinese mariners and merchants brought tofu to the Philippines between the 10th and 13th centuries. Filipinos eat it as tahô, a soft breakfast snack, and as tokwa, a firm fried tofu that stands in for meat in main meals. At first, making and eating tofu was limited to urban centers with influential Chinese minorities, such as Cebu and Tondo. It then spread quickly to remote native villages and islands.

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• 4. Westward Arrival

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  A 1704 translation of Domingo Fernández Navarrete's A Collection of Voyages and Travels describes how tofu was made. It is the earliest English documentation of the word. English tofu comes from the Japanese tōfu, which itself borrows the Chinese dòufǔ, meaning "bean curd, bean ferment".

  In 1770, Benjamin Franklin wrote to John Bartram about the food after encountering it on a trip to London. He enclosed a few soybeans and described the food as "cheese" from China. He was the first American to mention tofu.

  That same year, Franklin corresponded with the English merchant James Flint. Flint wrote the spelling "Towfu" while explaining how the Chinese turned callivances, meaning soybeans, into tofu.

  The plain term bean curd has been used in the United States since at least 1840. The first American tofu company was established in 1878.

  In 1908, Li Yuying opened a soy factory in France called the Usine de la Caséo-Sojaïne. He was a Chinese anarchist and vegetarian with a French degree in agriculture and biology. The factory was the world's first soy dairy and the first in France to make and sell beancurd.

  Still, most Westerners did not know tofu before the middle of the 20th century. William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi popularized it in the United States with The Book of Tofu in 1975.

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• 5. Curdling Science

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  Three stages sit under every block of tofu, whatever its size or style. First comes soy milk. Next it is coagulated into curds, called douhua. Finally the curds are pressed into cakes. The logic matches dairy cheese, where milk is curdled and the curds pressed and aged. The full routine runs through cleaning, soaking, grinding the beans in water, filtering, boiling, coagulating and pressing. Japanese raw silken tofu skips the pressing.

  Coagulation is the decisive step. Soy proteins, mainly the 7S and 11S types, normally push each other apart because of negative charges on their surfaces. Heating soy milk unfolds them and exposes water-repelling groups that were hidden inside. Positive ions from a coagulant then neutralize those charges. Attraction wins over repulsion, and the proteins clump into a gel.

  Gypsum, or calcium sulfate, is the traditional coagulant for Chinese-style tofu. It is quarried from geological deposits without any refining, which makes it the cheapest option. It dissolves poorly, so the reaction is slow. The result is smooth, tender and slightly brittle, with plenty of water and a soft texture. It also leaves tofu rich in calcium, which manufacturers like to advertise.

  Nigari is the Japanese answer. It is made mostly of magnesium chloride and produced from seawater after the sodium chloride is removed and the water evaporated. The name comes from nigai, the Japanese word for "bitter", yet it adds very little taste. American makers use calcium chloride widely for its flavor and low cost. Even clean seawater can do the job.

  Glucono delta-lactone, or GDL, takes the acid route. It is derived from glucose, is also used in cheesemaking, and slowly turns into gluconic acid in water. The proteins set evenly into one smooth gel with no air gaps. That lets silken tofu form directly in its container with no pressing, and it leaves a faint sour taste. Vinegar and lemon juice can also coagulate soy milk, but they affect flavor more. Enzymes such as papain have even been studied for making "instant tofu".

  Coagulants go in at between 1.5 and 5.0 grams per kilogram. Only 1 part per 1000 of the tofu eaten is coagulant. Most of it reacts with the protein, and the rest drains away in the whey.

  Tofu's bland reputation is partly a matter of technique. In a hot grind, heat inactivates the enzyme lipoxygenase, which otherwise creates off flavors. A cold grind leaves the enzyme active, and it produces aldehydes, alcohols and esters with beany notes. Color follows the beans and the gel. More calcium salts or more protein build a denser network that scatters more light, so the tofu looks whiter.

  A sour taste and a slightly cloudy storing liquid are the usual signs that bacteria have taken over and the tofu has spoiled.

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• 6. Soft To Firm

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  Sun-dubu is the softest tofu, a Korean specialty made by mixing soy milk with seawater or salty water from sea salt. The curds stay loose. Fresh sun-dubu is boiled and eaten with little or no seasoning, and factories sell it in tubes. Its best-known role is the heart of sundubu-jjigae, a soft tofu stew.

  Silken tofu, kinugoshi-dōfu in Japanese, literally means "silk-filtered". It is gelled with gypsum and left undrained and unpressed, with the curd uncut. Every silken grade is more delicate than pressed tofu. Cooks use it to replace dairy products and eggs in smoothies and baked desserts.

  Douhua, meaning "bean flower", is typically served a few hours after it is made. Chopsticks fail on it, so people use a spoon. Across China it is a popular breakfast dish, flavored with green onions, dried shrimp, soy sauce or chilli sauce. In summer it comes with crushed ice and in winter warm. Malaysia serves it warm with white or dark palm sugar syrup, or cold with longans. Some people do not count douhua as tofu at all, but as a food in its own right.

  Black douhua is made from black soybeans and prized for its earthy taste. Edamame tofu is a pale green Japanese variety, often studded with whole edamame.

  Momen-dōfu, "cotton tofu", is the firm kind. It has the firmness of raw meat and bounces back when pressed. Its skin keeps the pattern of the muslin that drained it, while the inside resembles a firm custard. In Gokayama in Toyama Prefecture and the Iya region of Tokushima, makers use seawater instead of nigari, or concentrated soy milk. Some squeeze the tofu under heavy weights. These styles come from places where travel is hard, such as remote islands, mountain villages and heavy snowfall areas.

  Dòugān, "dry tofu", sits at the far end. Most of its liquid is pressed out, leaving the firmness of fully cooked meat and a rubbery feel like paneer. Sliced thin, it becomes gānsī, strings that look like loose cooked noodles and are served cold, stir-fried or in soup. Baiye is flatter still, about 2 mm thick, with bulges in a square grid from the muslin. It can be rolled or pressed together and fried into su ji, which means "vegetarian chicken".

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• 7. Preserved And Leftover

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  Pickled tofu, called dòufurǔ in Chinese, starts as cubes of dried tofu left to dry fully under hay. Airborne bacteria slowly ferment them. The cubes are then soaked in salt water, Chinese rice wine, vinegar, minced chili peppers, or a mixture of rice, bean paste and soybeans. Red yeast rice gives red pickled tofu its color. In the Ryukyu Islands, tōfuyō is made from Okinawan Shima-dōfu and matured with koji mold, red koji mold and awamori.

  Stinky tofu is soft tofu fermented in a vegetable and fish brine. Its cheese-like smell can resemble rotting food. Fans describe the flavor and texture as delightful, and they prize a fried rind that is especially crisp.

  Frozen tofu comes from the Jiangnan region of China and is commonly made at home from soft tofu. Ice crystals tear large cavities into it and turn it yellowish. Protein-water bonds are replaced for good by protein-protein bonds, which makes the tofu springier and chewier. It is often paired with tatsoi as a winter dish.

  Mount Kōya, a center of Japanese Buddhism famed for shōjin ryōri, its vegetarian cuisine, gave its name to koya-dofu. Tradition says the method was discovered by accident when tofu was left outdoors in winter. It is shade-dried, while the shimidofu eaten mainly in the Tohoku region is sun-dried. Both keep without refrigeration and are rehydrated before cooking.

  Tofu making leaves useful by-products. Boiling soy milk in an open shallow pan forms a film that is collected and dried into yellowish sheets called yuba in Japanese. Its composition is roughly 50-55% protein and 24-26% lipids. Rolled into sticks it becomes tofu bamboo, which some cooks stir into congee for a silkier texture.

  Okara, whose Chinese name means "snowflake vegetable", is the fiber, protein and starch left behind after soy milk is pressed out. Farmers often feed it to animals. Cooks also use it in the Korean stew kongbiji jjigae and in vegetarian burgers in many Western nations. In Japan, okara even goes into ice cream.

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• 8. Tofu Today

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  Raw regular tofu is 85% water, 8% protein, 2% carbohydrates and 5% fat. A 100-gram serving supplies 76 calories and is a rich source of calcium, copper, iron and manganese. Its footprint is small too. Growing it needs about 1.3 square meters of land per 1000 kilocalories and releases about 1.6 kilograms of greenhouse gas per 100 grams of protein, among the lowest of any food.

  In the Americas, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, tofu is frequently associated with vegetarianism and veganism. Cooks barbecue firm Western tofu after marinating it overnight. Freezing and thawing it first makes it spongy and more absorbent. Silken tofu can replace cheese in lasagna. In India, tofu serves as a low-fat stand-in for paneer. In Northern Nigeria, awara is different again. Soy milk is curdled with a natural agent, pressed, seasoned and fried into cubes that are eaten as the main ingredient.

  The name has also stretched to foods with no soy at all. Almond tofu is a milky dessert hardened with agar. Burmese tofu, called to hpu, is made from besan, a chickpea flour, and the Shan variety uses yellow split pea flour. Egg tofu is steamed from beaten eggs and dashi, and it was invented in Japan during the Edo period. Thousand-layer tofu began as a Taiwanese invention called hundred-layer tofu and is built from soy protein isolate and starch.

  In Western politics, tofu has become a pejorative shorthand against left wing ideologies. In 2018, the US Republican Ted Cruz criticized Democrats for wanting Texas to become "just like California, right down to tofu and silicon and dyed hair". In 2022, British home secretary Suella Braverman attacked the "Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati" in the House of Commons and blamed them for obstructing the roads. In April 2025, Markus Söder, head of the German Christian Social Union, said Germany could look forward to more Leberkäse, a kind of meatloaf, instead of "Tofu-mania".

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