This Black Bean Tofu isn't Boring, it's Amazing

chinese black bean sauce is packed full of flavor and is super pungent in the most delicious way and tofu is kind of boring on its own but when you cook it together oh my goodness so good hey everyone i'm flo dude is behind the camera and we're all about simple food simple faith tofu is one of those ingredients that i grew up eating a lot of and it probably is because the village where my mom's family is from ate a lot of tofu i even remember my grandmother making tofu from scratch i'm using a large pack of tofu they come in smaller packages but this one is about a pound and a half 700 grams and it's just the traditional tofu we have like soft medium and firm so this is probably a medium tofu it's packed in liquid so i'm just gonna go drain it and then slice it up i am using a piece of paper towel on my cutting board because there is still quite a bit of liquid within the tofu that will drain out just because of the weight of it so i'm just going to put them on the paper towel to catch any excess liquid a medium firm tofu is perfect for this dish because it will hold its shape and the soft tofu is just too soft they'll fall apart on you and a firm tofu is just well too firm okay i'm going to make a cut just down the middle and then slice it into about half an inch some thick pieces because we are pan frying in oil and i want it to have a slightly crispy edge i am going to make sure that we kind of take out as much moisture as we can so i'm just going to lay them down on another sheet of paper towel i'm using a large cast iron pan today and we're going to heat this up on medium i'm going to put in a tablespoon of vegetable oil and my veg my beloved vegetable oil dispenser has like stopped working properly so i'm like really quite annoyed anyways trying to get a tablespoon out it used to just flow right out it didn't leak didn't yeah i know something must be like clogging up the spout because you look all silly shaking yourself like that i'm gonna add my tofu pieces and then we're going to turn the heat down to low okay we're going to let it sear on that one side for about five minutes until it's evenly browned on one side and then we're going to flip them and do the other side and we're going to have to do this in batches obviously not all of it will fit in my pan okay after five minutes we're going to flip them over and they should be sticking if you don't have a cast iron pan you can always use a non-stick pan oh look at that golden color yeah so it's not super crispy but it is slightly well slightly crispy and that will help to adhere the sauce so once they've all been flipped over we'll cook them for another five minutes on the other side okay once they have browned on both sides you can remove them and put them on a plate and work on the other batches okay last batch remember to keep adding oil as you need it and while whoops while i am preparing this last batch of tofu i'm going to prepare the rest of my ingredients i sent dude to buy onions and he came back with these like giant onions i thought they were much smaller so any case they're really beautiful onions though good job dude so i'm only going to use half of this huge onion you can use a medium sized onion we're just going to slice it up i actually prefer slicing my onions top to bottom we also have two green onions just cut off the tops and the bottoms we're just going to cut these into two inch pieces three cloves of garlic i'm gonna chop up okay i'm just gonna chop this up you can use a garlic press if you want i'm still waiting for my tofu so i have time we're just going to set this aside and then we're going to chop up the black beans i'm using a tablespoon of fermented black bean and i've already rinsed these underwater they're quite salty so you will want to rinse them and i'm just going to chop this up i don't like biting into like whole black beans some people just leave them whole and you can do that as well i just like them more mushed up so that they're part of the sauce as opposed to whole black beans that you bite into okay i'm just gonna put this back in the bowl i'm gonna add the garlic to it i have a thumb sized piece of ginger and it really is like almost the size of my thumb it is not it is so i'm going to take off the peel you don't have to take off the peel but i find this um organic ginger the peel is really thick so i'm just going to peel it and you just want to scrape it with the back of a knife some people suggest using a spoon however you don't need a sharp edge to scrape off the skin i'm going to grate the ginger right into my bowl of black bean and garlic and i prefer grating ginger because it gets it to a very like fine consistency compared to chopping there are no rules here that thumb size piece of ginger will give you about a tablespoon of grated ginger not thumb size heating up my pan again at medium heat adding another tablespoon or so of oil there's still a little bit of oil already in there so i'm just going to add enough to make about a tablespoon and we're going to stir fry our onions not the green onions just the regular onion okay while that onion is cooking we're going to make our sauce have a quarter cup of chicken broth i'm adding a tablespoon of shaoxing wine and shaoxing wine is just a rice cooking wine if you don't have this you can use sherry or bourbon or whiskey you found all those are good options 1 tablespoon of soy sauce one teaspoon of sugar and a pinch of salt just making sure the sugar is dissolved in there and that's it set that aside [Music] okay i just pushed the onions to the side i'm just gonna add a little bit more oil because it seems that the oil has been all absorbed this onion is very dry i'm gonna add all our black bean garlic and ginger stir-frying this for about 30 seconds the onions took about two minutes to get to this point wow that arola you know it smells so good right punchy but good and then adding the sauce i'm adding uh two tablespoons of water cold water and we're going to add a teaspoon of corn starch remember corn starch only dissolves in a cold or room temperature water and because all the sauce evaporated i'm just going to add this also to thicken the sauce but also to add some liquid back into the dish i also turned the heat off because it was going crazy so you have to pay attention to what you're doing filming doesn't help so everything's a little bit slower than anticipated so it takes a little bit of extra time and then things happen that i wasn't anticipating all right so this is on low right now i'm going to add the tofu back in might as well add any drippings from the tofu we're also going to add our green onions and just sort of gently toss it so that the sauce gets everywhere without breaking down the tofu we're just going to cook it for about a minute or two to heat the tofu through again all right getting this all onto the same plate just use the same plate as i had placed the tofu in earlier oh it smells so good dude [Music] all right are you all ready for the taste you know tofu does not evoke sexy food but when you add a strong enough character in the flavoring the sauce then it really does transform the tofu makes it a lot more exciting as a meat substitute if you're doing like a meatless monday this is like perfect pair that with some chinese veg and some good old rice and you got a fantastic meal all right let's get into this that simple act of frying the tofu adds a lot of color and another layer of taste to the tofu it's still soft inside wow that black bean sauce that is so versatile can be used on so many different dishes proteins so versatile so good packed with flavor a little black bean you are so powerful yeah i'm down for meatless mondays even though it's not monday thanks dude you all know that most of the time i can't be bothered but it really is worthwhile to take a few extra steps to get a crisp on your tofu make your sauce and it's still a super simple recipe to add to your meatless mondays or just anytime during the week so easy to make some big news i know a lot of people have been asking about it the paperback for the newest cookbook chinese homestyle is finally out i'm sorry it's taken so long but we do everything ourselves including the layout all the photos it's bigger than my previous cookbooks it's has a practically a photo of every single recipe in the book it's beautiful it's been such a joy working on this cookbook i really hope that you guys will enjoy it it should be available to order today barring any delay from amazon if there's a delay it's on their side so i hope you'll go and check it out in the meantime for more black bean recipes check that one out and i will see you over there

Channel: Flo Lum

Views: 64,755

Keywords: simpleordinaryjoyful, flomade, simple ordinary joyful, flo lum

Id: L506N7fi_DE

Length: 13min 21sec (801 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021