Tofu

This post was originally going to include three ponzu variations, but after I squeezed the juice from a couple dozen yuzu and an unbelievable citrusy perfume overwhelmed the apartment, my wife asked me to save some juice for shochu cocktails! Wait -- let me back up:

My friend and hero Elizabeth Andoh has just published her latest cookbook, Kansha. Make sure to pick up a copy! As I paged through the book, Elizabeth's recipe for age-dashi dofu, or crispy creamy tofu, as she describes it, caught my eye (p 178). I had to cook it, and it was delicious! Here's my adaption of her recipe, for 4 servings:

Here's the story: It's snowing like mad in Brooklyn and my wife, mother-in-law and I are stuck in the apartment waiting for my honey to begin labor. Yep, she's due any moment now -- and we're laughing that, naturally, the baby's gonna arrive smack in the middle of a major snow storm! So far, so good, but there was the little matter of lunch. We didn't feel like doing a big cooking, and we certainly weren't going out in this muck. So what to do?

There's nothing like fresh, handmade Japanese "silken" tofu (called kinugoshi in Japanese). Coaxed from just soybeans, water, and nigari, a coagulant derived from seawater, it's a quintessential expression of Japanese cuisine -- the idea of finessing something so sublime from a few simple elements. I first tasted the real deal at the workshop of a traditional tofu maker in Kyoto I visited one morning before sunrise. With a lovely custard-like texture, delicate natural sweetness and seductive fresh soybean flavor, their tofu had as much to do with the stuff sold in supermarkets as a beautiful farmstead ricotta does with a tub of Polly-O.

Let's talk about how to make a dashi before we get to this simple, delicious soup. Everything I've read about preparing konbu-katsuobushi dashi (kelp and dried, shaved bonito) says to first add the konbu to a pot of water and bring it to just a boil, then to remove the konbu before the water starts to really boil. Atsushi took a totally different approach.