49 Fun Facts About Tofu

Tofu is prized for its protein, but what makes up about 85% of a raw block?

Water: a raw block of regular tofu is about 85% water and only about 8% protein. The firmer styles are firmer simply because more of that water has been pressed out of the curds.

A Chinese text of about 965, the earliest known to mention tofu, says locals nicknamed it the vice mayor's what?

Mutton: the Qing Yilu tells of an official who went without meat and bought tofu every day instead, so townspeople dubbed it the vice mayor's mutton. Legend dates tofu a thousand years earlier, but no older record survives.

Chinese legend says tofu was invented over 2,000 years ago by Liu An, a prince of which dynasty?

Han: Liu An, a grandson of the dynasty's founder, ruled Huainan until his death in 122 BC. Yet no surviving text links him to tofu until more than 1,000 years later, so the legend cannot be confirmed.

Unlike some plant proteins, tofu is called a complete protein because it supplies all nine of what?

Essential amino acids: the body cannot make these nine itself, so they have to come from food, which is why soy foods are such a mainstay of meat-free diets.

One theory says tofu was discovered by accident when ground boiled soybeans were mixed with what?

Impure sea salt: unrefined sea salt carries other mineral salts besides table salt, and these curdle hot soybean soup, so a cook seasoning the pot could have made the first curds by accident.

One origin theory says the Chinese adapted tofu-making from the milk-curdling of which people?

The Mongolians: the clue is a word. Rufu, a term for curdled milk first written down in China's Sui dynasty, shares its second syllable with doufu, the Chinese word for tofu.

Japan's kitsune udon is topped with fried tofu because folklore says which animal loves it?

Foxes: kitsune is the Japanese word for fox. Foxes are held to be messengers of the Shinto god of rice, so fried tofu, said to be their favourite food, is left as an offering at the god's shrines.

Tofu's spread across East Asia is thought to have followed the spread of which religion?

Buddhism: its monks kept meatless diets and leaned on tofu for protein, and monks travelling between China and Japan probably carried the craft of making it across the sea.

Tofu is rich in isoflavones, plant compounds that weakly mimic which human hormone?

Estrogen: that resemblance once raised fears that soy foods might feed breast cancer, but decades of studies have found no such link.

The earliest Japanese tofu document describes it offered in 1183 at a holy site in which city?

Nara: a priest's diary at the Kasuga Shrine lists tofu among the altar offerings, written not with today's character for bean but with the one for Tang China.

The Edo-period bestseller Tofu Hyakuchin, published in 1782, is a collection of 100 what?

Recipes: the cookbook was such an immediate hit that a second volume with still more tofu dishes was published the very next year.

Which American founding father described tofu as a Chinese "cheese" in a 1770 letter sent home from London?

Benjamin Franklin: he posted a botanist friend in Philadelphia some soybeans along with an account of the "cheese" made from them in China, after asking a merchant who had lived there how it was done.

In which street-racing manga does Takumi hone his drifting on dawn tofu deliveries for his father's shop?

Initial D: Takumi makes the runs in his father's ageing Toyota AE86, and the series turned that humble tofu delivery car into a cult icon among drifting fans.

Europe's first tofu factory, opened around 1910 by Chinese anarchist Li Yuying, stood just outside the capital of which country?

France: Li staffed his works at Colombes, outside Paris, with young Chinese who studied after their shifts, the seed of a work-study scheme that later brought Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping to the country.

Google's Noto fonts are named for "no tofu"; what is tofu in font slang?

Blank boxes for missing characters: the empty rectangles a device shows when it has no font for a script look like little blocks of tofu, so Google set out to cover every written language and leave none.

In India, tofu is often cooked as a lower-fat stand-in for which dairy food?

Paneer: both come as mild white blocks that hold their shape in a curry, so cooks swap one for the other, and firm tofu is the closest match in texture.

What is the traditional and most widely used coagulant for Chinese-style tofu?

Calcium sulfate, or gypsum: it is dug from the ground and needs no refining, which makes it the cheapest coagulant, and it leaves every block it sets rich in calcium.

Japanese nigari, used to set tofu, consists mainly of what?

Magnesium chloride: during the Second World War Japan's government seized the country's nigari to extract magnesium for aircraft alloys, forcing tofu makers to switch to another coagulant.

Nigari, the Japanese tofu coagulant, takes its name from the word for what?

Bitter: the brine is written with the characters for "bitter liquid" and tastes that way on its own, yet tofu set with it carries almost none of that taste and is said to keep more of the bean's own flavour.

Japanese agedashi tofu is cooked how before it is served in a pool of dashi broth?

Deep-fried: the cubes are dusted in potato starch first, so they come out crisp outside and custardy within, and the warm broth is poured around them only at the last moment.

In tofu-making, how does heating soy milk prepare its proteins for the coagulant?

Heat unfolds the proteins: once denatured, they turn their water-shy parts outwards, so when a coagulant cancels the charges that keep them apart, they clump together into curd.

Which soy food is made by binding fermented soybeans into a firm cake?

Tempeh: in this Javanese food a mould knits the cooked beans into a sliceable cake, and because the beans themselves stay in, it carries more protein and fibre than tofu does.

Cubes of soft tofu and wakame seaweed are the classic additions to which soup?

Miso soup: cooks turn off the heat before stirring in the miso paste, because boiling it hard drives off its aroma and dulls the flavour.

Japan's two everyday tofu styles, kinugoshi and momen, are named after silk and which other fabric?

Cotton: momen tofu is drained and pressed in a box lined with cotton cloth, whose weave prints its surface. Silken kinugoshi, despite the name, is not strained through any cloth, which is why it stays so smooth.

What does the Chinese term douhua, for very soft tofu pudding, literally mean?

Bean flower: the curds are left so soft and wobbly that they are eaten with a spoon, and the texture also earned the dish a second, blunter name in northern China: tofu brain.

Taho, the Philippine street snack of warm silken tofu and sago pearls, is sweetened with what?

Brown sugar syrup: the caramelised syrup is called arnibal, and vendors skim thin slices of warm tofu into a cup, then ladle in the syrup and the chewy pearls.

What is traditionally added to a bubbling pot of Korean sundubu-jjigae just before it is eaten?

A raw egg: the stew reaches the table still boiling in its heavy pot, so an egg cracked in at the last moment cooks in the broth and makes it richer.

Monica Lee opened a restaurant devoted to sundubu-jjigae in 1986 in the Koreatown of which US city?

Los Angeles: her Beverly Soon Tofu was the first restaurant in the city to specialise in the bubbling soft-tofu stew. Ten years later BCD Tofu House opened in the same Koreatown and grew into a chain of more than ten branches.

In Chinese cooking, what kind of tofu is dougan?

Extra-firm dry tofu: gan means dry, and so much liquid is pressed out of the block that it can be cut into fine strands and served like a plate of noodles.

Chinese su ji, a tight roll of thin pressed tofu sheets, is a vegetarian stand-in for which meat?

Chicken: su ji means vegetarian chicken. The sheets are rolled into a tight log, then simmered or fried, and the finished roll is served as mock meat.

What happens to tofu when it is frozen and thawed?

It becomes spongy and yellowish: ice crystals open a honeycomb of holes in the block, so once thawed it soaks up a marinade far faster than fresh tofu, which is why some cooks freeze it on purpose.

Japan's traditional freeze-dried tofu is named after which mountain, the seat of a great monastery?

Mount Koya: legend says a young monk there forgot a block of tofu outdoors on a winter night, and the monks liked the result enough to start freezing and drying it on purpose.

Changsha's black stinky tofu was famously praised by which leader, a native of the surrounding province?

Mao Zedong: back in his home province of Hunan in the late 1950s, he ate the stinky tofu at Changsha's Huogongdian restaurant and pronounced it still good.

Legend says Wang Zhihe, the Qing-era inventor of stinky tofu, became a tofu seller after failing what?

The imperial examination: stranded in Beijing, he salted a batch of unsold tofu in a jar to save it, found it had turned smelly but delicious, and built a business that still carries his name.

What gives the crimson variety of Chinese pickled tofu its colour?

Red yeast rice: the rice is fermented with a red mould that also makes monacolin K, a compound identical to the cholesterol drug lovastatin, which is why the rice is sold as a supplement too.

Mapo tofu comes from which Chinese province?

Sichuan: the dish's tingle comes from Sichuan pepper, which is no true pepper but the dried fruit husk of a prickly ash, a cousin of citrus trees.

What does the "mapo" in mapo tofu refer to?

A pockmarked old woman: ma is short for mazi, pockmarks, and po means an old woman. It was the nickname of the Mrs Chen whose little restaurant is said to have created the dish.

Yuba, the delicacy sold as tofu skin, forms how?

As a film on hot soy milk: the skin is lifted off the pan in sheets and hung up to dry, and since no coagulant is involved, it is not strictly tofu at all.

In China, a "tofu-dreg project" is slang for what?

A shoddily built structure: Premier Zhu Rongji coined the phrase in 1998 on a tour of Yangtze flood dykes, which he said were as flimsy as the crumbly dregs left over from making tofu.

Burmese "tofu" is made from what?

Chickpea flour: the batter is cooked with water and turmeric until thick, then left to set like polenta, so nothing is curdled and no soy is involved.

Sweet "almond tofu" contains no soy; what is it usually set with?

Agar: the seaweed jelly sets sweetened almond-flavoured milk into soft white cubes, so the dessert is tofu in looks alone.

What is Japanese hiyayakko?

Chilled tofu with toppings: hiya means cold, and yakko is said to come from the square crest on the coats of samurai servants, which the cut blocks recall.

Aburaage, the thin fried tofu pouch, is best known as the wrapper for which sushi?

Inarizushi: one story has it beginning in the Edo period, when someone stuffed rice into the fried tofu left as offerings at the shrines of Inari, the god of the rice harvest.

Which Chinese people created yong tau foo, tofu stuffed with minced meat or fish paste?

The Hakka: the name is theirs too, from nyong, to stuff. Meat-stuffed tofu is a signature of Hakka kitchens, and the fish-paste soup version grew up among Hakka migrants in Southeast Asia.

The Indonesian word for tofu, tahu, is borrowed from which Chinese dialect?

Hokkien: migrants from China's Fujian coast brought both the food and their word for it, tau-hu, which also became tauhu in Malaysia and Singapore.

Central Java's tahu bacem is tofu simmered with spices and which sweetener before it is fried?

Palm sugar: the tofu simmers with it, shallots, garlic, coriander and bay leaves until the pot is almost dry, and only then is it fried, which is what makes central Java's bacem so sweet.

Tofurky, the tofu-and-wheat roast launched in Oregon in 1995, was created as a meat-free centrepiece for which holiday?

Thanksgiving: maker Seth Tibbott had been selling soy foods since 1980 with little success before the holiday roast made his company's name.

As of 2024, which country has overtaken the United States as the world's biggest grower of soybeans?

Brazil: it has out-harvested the United States every year since 2019. About three-quarters of the world's soy goes to animal feed, and only around 7% is eaten directly as foods such as tofu.

A 2018 study in Science found that protein from which food causes about 25 times the greenhouse emissions of tofu protein?

Beef: cattle raised for meat cause about 50 kg of greenhouse gases for every 100 g of protein, against roughly 2 kg for tofu. Much of the gap comes from the methane cattle belch and the land they need.