Tofu Trivia
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49 free Tofu trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Tofu has been eaten for more than 2,000 years, and this trivia quiz covers everything from the legend of the Han prince who supposedly invented it to the Tofurky on a modern Thanksgiving table. The science questions explain how soy milk becomes curd: gypsum versus nigari, why heating denatures the proteins, what glucono delta-lactone does for silken tofu and why freezing a block turns it into a sponge. The food questions travel across Asia and beyond: mapo tofu and the pockmarked grandmother of Chengdu, stinky tofu and its months-long brine, douhua and Filipino taho, Korean sundubu-jjigae, Japanese agedashi and hiyayakko, yuba skin, okara pulp, Hakka yong tau foo, Indonesian tahu and the Burmese "tofu" that contains no soy at all. History questions cover the 965 Japanese record, the 1782 book of a hundred tofu recipes, Benjamin Franklin's 1770 letter and the world's first soy dairy in France. Every answer was verified against Wikipedia's articles on tofu and its dishes, and each question links to its source. Try our Sushi and Chinese Food quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Tofu is prized for its protein, but what makes up about 85% of a raw block?
Water
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.
Q 02A Chinese text of about 965, the earliest known to mention tofu, says locals nicknamed it the vice mayor's what?
Mutton
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.
Q 03Chinese legend says tofu was invented over 2,000 years ago by Liu An, a prince of which dynasty?
Han
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.
Q 04Unlike some plant proteins, tofu is called a complete protein because it supplies all nine of what?
Essential amino acids
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.
Q 05One theory says tofu was discovered by accident when ground boiled soybeans were mixed with what?
Impure sea salt
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.
Q 06One origin theory says the Chinese adapted tofu-making from the milk-curdling of which people?
The Mongolians
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.
Q 07Japan's kitsune udon is topped with fried tofu because folklore says which animal loves it?
Foxes
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.
Q 08Tofu's spread across East Asia is thought to have followed the spread of which religion?
Buddhism
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.
Q 09Tofu is rich in isoflavones, plant compounds that weakly mimic which human hormone?
Estrogen
Estrogen: that resemblance once raised fears that soy foods might feed breast cancer, but decades of studies have found no such link.
Q 10The earliest Japanese tofu document describes it offered in 1183 at a holy site in which city?
Nara
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.
Q 11The Edo-period bestseller Tofu Hyakuchin, published in 1782, is a collection of 100 what?
Recipes
Recipes: the cookbook was such an immediate hit that a second volume with still more tofu dishes was published the very next year.
Q 12Which American founding father described tofu as a Chinese "cheese" in a 1770 letter sent home from London?
Benjamin Franklin
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.
Q 13In which street-racing manga does Takumi hone his drifting on dawn tofu deliveries for his father's shop?
Initial D
Q 21In tofu-making, how does heating soy milk prepare its proteins for the coagulant?
Heat unfolds the proteins
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.
Q 22Which soy food is made by binding fermented soybeans into a firm cake?
Tempeh
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.
Q 23Cubes of soft tofu and wakame seaweed are the classic additions to which soup?
Miso soup
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.
Q 14Europe's first tofu factory, opened around 1910 by Chinese anarchist Li Yuying, stood just outside the capital of which country?
France
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.
Q 15Google's Noto fonts are named for "no tofu"; what is tofu in font slang?
Blank boxes for missing characters
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.
Q 16In India, tofu is often cooked as a lower-fat stand-in for which dairy food?
Paneer
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.
Q 17What is the traditional and most widely used coagulant for Chinese-style tofu?
Calcium sulfate, or gypsum
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.
Q 18Japanese nigari, used to set tofu, consists mainly of what?
Magnesium chloride
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.
Q 19Nigari, the Japanese tofu coagulant, takes its name from the word for what?
Bitter
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.
Q 20Japanese agedashi tofu is cooked how before it is served in a pool of dashi broth?
Deep-fried
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.
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.
Q 24Japan's two everyday tofu styles, kinugoshi and momen, are named after silk and which other fabric?
Cotton
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.
Q 25What does the Chinese term douhua, for very soft tofu pudding, literally mean?
Bean flower
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.
Q 26Taho, the Philippine street snack of warm silken tofu and sago pearls, is sweetened with what?
Brown sugar syrup
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.
Q 27What is traditionally added to a bubbling pot of Korean sundubu-jjigae just before it is eaten?
A raw egg
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.
Q 28Monica Lee opened a restaurant devoted to sundubu-jjigae in 1986 in the Koreatown of which US city?
Los Angeles
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.
Q 29In Chinese cooking, what kind of tofu is dougan?
Extra-firm dry tofu
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.
Q 30Chinese su ji, a tight roll of thin pressed tofu sheets, is a vegetarian stand-in for which meat?
Chicken
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.