from PM’s CC Vol I. PM’s photo was so cute, I wanted to try making this. Plus I haven’t featured any tofu lately! Must rectify.
客家 ke4jia1 — Cantonese
嚷 rang3 — 嚷 means to blurt out or shout, but here perhaps it means something different? Or maybe it’s saying that here is the tofu Cantonese people shout about! (Actually, upon further research I suspect it refers to the stuffed aspect of the dish…嚷苦瓜 is stuffed bitter melon, for example.)
豆腐 dou4fu3 — tofu
Ingredients:
4 pieces fresh bean curd
6 oz pork, chopped
2 oz fish fillet, chopped (any firm white fish is ok! I used basa)
1 Tb dried shrimp, soaked and chopped
1/2 stalk scallion, chopped
1/2 stalk scallion, shredded
1 1/2 cup water or soup stock
2 Tb soy sauce or oyster sauce
1 Tb cornstarch + 1 Tb water
pork marinade:
1/2 ts salt
1 Tb rice wine
2 ts cornstarch
1 Tb soy sauce
Method:
1. weight bean curd for 2 hours to squeeze out excess water (or boil in salt water for 2 minutes and drain). cut each piece diagonally into 4 triangles.
2. mix chopped pork, fish, and chopped scallion with marinade. cut slit in long side of tofu, stuff with pork mix.
3. fry tofu, meat side down, for 2 mins until golden brown. add water. cover, simmer 3-4 mins until pork is cooked. dish out carefully.
4. add soy sauce (or oyster sauce), then cornstarch paste, cook until thickened. sprinkle shredded scallion and pour over tofu. serve.
I used about a quarter of that fish fillet and a fist-sized chunk of pork.
Since PM implied that one should be mincing the pork on one’s own in this recipe, rather than getting someone else to grind it, I obeyed and spent half an hour of my life hacking at my 6 oz of pork with a blunt knife (keep forgetting to sharpen! ugh). Next time I will just stick it in the food processor and give it a whirl.
After quartering the tofu into triangles in step 1, I ended up with pretty small pieces, and it was quite an adventure stuffing the raw filling into a narrow slit while trying to pervent the tofu from splitting apart entirely. Most of my pieces ended up with a little inside the tofu and most of it slapped on the surface near the slit.
It seems a little silly to pour a very non-viscous sauce over the finished tofu, so this time I took one for the team and added cornstarch paste to thicken the sauce.
I was pleasantly surprised when nothing fell apart during the cooking stage. I did handle the stuffed tofu with great care, though, so maybe the intactness was due to skill?
Time taken: 1 hr 15 minutes
Difficulty level: just below headdesk
Oddly enough most of the tofu was plated meat-side-down.
