Viet World Kitchen

Spicy Basil Chicken and Tofu Recipe

The Hmong farmers have returned to our weekly farmer’s market with a wealth of Asian produce. Last Saturday, they had gorgeous Thai basil and I swooped down upon a couple of bunches. Basil discolors quickly, its shelf life under refrigeration is just a few days. I wasn’t about to let it go to waste and thought of Thai chicken and basil, a simple stir-fry.

The thing is, I didn’t want to make the dish with all chicken so I worked in some tofu. I substituted 10 ounces (300 grams) of extra-firm tofu for 8 ounces (240 grams) of the chicken in the original recipe, which called for a pound. That’s one of several strategy for using tofu for low-meat dishes.

The keys to this dish include (1) washing and drying the basil leaves (keep them whole) and (2) seasoning and panfrying the tofu.

To seal in the moisture in the chicken, I lightly coat it with cornstarch and soy sauce; it’s typically added to the wok as is, only to be embellished by flavors during the cooking process. Dark soy sauce adds color but the black soy sauce is semi sweet. With so little used, I suppose you could use kecap manis, if you want. 

 You can make this dish with mint or Italian basil but for the real deal, Thai basil’s warm spice note is magnificent. If flowers are present on the sprigs, use them!

Asian Tofu Recipe #1 on Favorite List

We’re entering the season when cookbook reviewers announce their top picks of the year. T. Susan Chang, an author, writer, and commentator on NPR kicked off her 2012 list of favorite recipes with one from Asian Tofu! Susan has cooked through and championed the book in NPR’s summer cookbook picks as well as in a glowing Boston Globe review.  

As a professional reviewer, Susan sees a lot of books. She’s persnickety and funny, as you may know if you’ve read her book, A Spoonful of Promises. So when she zoomed in on the recipe for Korean panfried tofu topped with a medley of Asian mushrooms, I was delighted. Okay, I was also relieved. Susan doesn't hold back when she dislikes something.

Pictured above from a reference shot I took long ago, dubu jeon is a recipe that wasn’t photographed for the book. That meant that Susan pored through my entire book. Often times, people cook dishes that’s accompanied by a sexy beauty shot.

I’m old fashioned, and I suppose so is Susan. We grew up with minimally photographed cookbooks. We paged through and perused, letting our palates imagine flavors and textures. Nowadays, cookbooks are heavily photo driven so I'm doubly gratelful that she dug deep and deeper. (I love photos but include too many in a cookbook and you may take space away from good recipe instruction and/or drive up the cost of the book.)

When my publisher and I put Asian Tofu together, my aim was to cover the gamut, from DIY tofu that took cooks from dried beans to curd to wonderful dishes that simply required a trip to a supermarket. Cooks can plug in anywhere to experience beancurd deliciousness. I’m happy that Susan has done just that and encourages others to follow suit.

Since the beginning of September I’ve been in and out of town for a total of 5 week. I just finished my last gig for 2012 and took this week to pause and recover. Lots of good things are happening but I needed to catch my breath. Whew. This was a nice way to finish the week.

Keep up with Susan's picks as she reveals them on her blog. It's bound to have delicious things you want to try. Plus, it's just good reading.

Soy Chicharron Recipe

I didn’t come up with this idea. It belongs to Seattle-based radio show host Dick Stein. When we met up in September to tape an interview for KPLU, Dick said that after reading and cooking from Asian Tofu, he was inspired to buy dried tofu skin and deep fry it. The result was soy chicharron, Dick said.  

You can do all kinds of amazing things with tofu skin, which despite its name is really the film that forms on hot soymilk. The Japanese call it yuba and the Chinese know it as doufu pi or fu pi (tofu skin); in Vietnamese, tofu skin is called dau hu ky. You have likely had it at dim sum or on a Viet ride plate as a dumpling wrapper to encase a paste of shrimp; the recipe for those fried shrimp tofu skin rolls (xia fu pi juan) is on page 182 in Asian Tofu.

There are many kinds of tofu skin and basically, they differ in how dried they are. If you’re interested in extra details, I posted a tofu skin primer earlier this year and tofu guru William Shurtleff just published an online history of yuba. 

Dick’s tofu skin chicharrones used sheets of dried tofu skin – sold at Chinese and Vietnamese markets near the dried mushrooms. Get a flat package that contains the yellow pieces of tofu skin. Then get ready to fry up the skin into sparkly pieces.

Asian Tofu Gallery of Recipes + New Book Announcement

When I write a cookbook, I take reference photos of the dishes and squirrel them away for recipe testers as well as for my editor, designer, stylists, and photographer. I don't write recipes for cupcakes and meatballs. My topics are often unfamiliar to people that I collaborate with and I can communicate easily and quickly with photos. I call them reference shots. 

With Asian Tofu, we inserted lots of pictures into the finished book. However, for the sake of space and aesthetics, we had to leave others out. I am not one for cramming a zillion images into a work because it can distract from the actual recipes. 

I love what we did to convey the infinite possibilities of tofu. It's fascinating. Late last night, I reviewed a bunch of the original reference shots that I took, in addition to a few that stylist and tester Karen Shinto sent me. I got wistful and organized an image gallery of the recipes on Flickr.

Looking at the photos, I got to relive the bookmaking process. It was three (3) year's worth of work that involved a global group of friends and colleagues. I'm darn proud of what Team Tofu produced.

Fermented Tofu Misozuke Recipe

I came home on Sunday and inspected a couple of tubs of tofu that I‘d left sitting in the fridge while I was away on the Pacific Northwest tofu tour. One contained creamy salty tofu misozuke, an old school type of fermented tofu from Japan that I’d made about 6 weeks earlier. I smeared a piece on bread to taste. It had mellowed and matured nicely while I was traveling.

The other tub of tofu – a block of super-firm tofu, had slimy white and orange stuff on it. I threw it out as it had clearly gone bad. That’s the difference between tofu that’s been preserved and not. One you want to eat and the other you discard.

A while back, I posted a Q&A with Dang Vu, a Vietnamese-American who’d started making and selling tofu misozuke in the Bay Area. A couple of Twitter friends suggested that I make the stuff so I did. There’s a fermented tofu recipe in Asian Tofu (see page 41) so I wasn’t daunted. Note that some people call tofu misozuke "vegan cheese." To me, it's just an Asian type of fermented tofu.