I love eating tofu – the silken soft and smooth beancurd that melts in your mouth. Braised tofu, steamed tofu with minced pork, stir-fried egg tofu, home-made egg tofu, mapo tofu etc – you name it, I’ve most likely done it.
This recipe uses silken tofu as a base to mix in other ingredients for the purpose of steaming. This includes meat, seafood and some vegetables, which makes this dish a lovely ‘one-pot’ of sorts. You can stop at the step after the tofu is steamed and simply eat it like this; you can also take it a step further and deep-fry the tofu to get a crispy snack. Either ways, this is a great dish to have on its own and it is easy to make any time, any day!
Ingredients:
- Silken tofu: 600g
- Prawn: 200g, shelled, deveined and finely chopped
- Minced pork: 100g
- Breakfast ham: 20g, chopped
- Spring onion: 2 stalks, finely chopped
- Oil: 2 tbsp + 500ml + extra for greasing loaf pan
- Salt: 3/4 tsp
- Sugar: 1 tsp
- White pepper: 1/2 tsp
- Sesame oil: 1 tsp
- Egg white: 1
- Potato starch flour: 1 bowl (about 50g)
- Mayonnaise: to serve
Method:
- Grease 1 loaf pan with oil.
- Combine tofu, prawns, minced pork, ham, spring onion and 1 tbsp oil in a mixing bowl.
- Mix in salt, sugar, white pepper, sesame oil and egg white.
- Pour tofu mixture into loaf pan. Press down lightly to compress.
- Steam 15 min on high heat. Remove from heat and cool down for 15 min.
- Drain away water from inside the loaf pan. Flip it over to remove the tofu from the pan.
- Heat 500ml oil in wok.
- Slice steamed tofu into finger-sized pieces. Coat with potato starch flour, patting away excess.
- Slide into hot oil. Deep-fry for 1 min till golden brown.
- Remove and place on paper towel to remove excess oil.
- Garnish with remaining spring onion. Serve hot with mayonnaise.
Tricks:
- There was quite a lot of gravy that gathered in the loaf pan after the tofu is steamed. You will have to drain this away so as to be able to properly slice up the tofu for deep-frying. Don’t throw it away though – use it to cook rice or soup!
- You can of course eat the tofu right after it is steamed, though that wouldn’t give it its most ultimate taste.
- I didn’t know potato starch flour could be used for deep-frying, and with such tasty results! What I did was to purposely coat some tofu slices with extra bits of the flour so that there are extra crispy bits to munch on other than the tofu.
Disclaimers:
- Not sure if it was because I didn’t chop my prawns and spring onions fine enough, but the tofu was rather flimsy to handle after it was steamed, such that I had to be really careful while coating them with flour and putting them into the hot oil.
- The steamed tofu actually shrunk by about one-fifth from its uncooked version because of the water that was drained out of it.
Serving:
10 slices of tofu
