The lack of agreement across brands on what “extra firm tofu” is is, in fact, very high on my list of unimportant problems.
Several years back “extra firm” still had high water content and needed to be diligently pressed and pan fried with care if you wanted to achieve crispy.
And then I guess tofu had a moment and brands got scared of losing people to trial-and-error and started manufacturing extra-firm tofu you could use to break a window and escape a house fire with.
And the more Americanized brands went that direction while the traditional brands said “no that’s fucking stupid we’re not changing anything” and SOME brands said “what if we do like the middle of that?”
Buying tofu is now in fact a vibe-check game of assessing a brand’s packaging and gauging what YOU think they mean by “extra firm”
It’s actually worse in fact because you need to play the vibe-check game twice on account of the recipe will inevitably call for some kind of “extra firm” and you need to know ITS vibes.
Asking you to grate the tofu on a cheese grater and bake it? Westernized. You want that red brick tofu. You want Whole Foods amount of extra firm or SUPER firm because if that thing has any amount of moisture left in it it’ll disintegrate like Tubby Custard on the grater.
Tofu scrambled eggs? You want the OG extra firm. You want it to hold its form but still have that softness and give unless your goal is to imitate sad dining hall scrambled eggs.
Many such difficulties in today’s tofu landscape
They should be printing the tofu's mechanical properties like it's a structural material.
Packaging should have one of these
#my trick for checking tofu firmness on the packaging is to look at the kj per 100g#more kj per 100g = less water content #if one tofu has 300kj per 100g and one tofu has 500kj per 100g then I know which one's gonna be wetter and softer (via @demiurgenesis)
Hello??
Hello!!!???
Shaking your hand shaking your hand shaking your hand???????
These are the random extra/super firm tofus in my fridge and the labels are based on my own experience with them. Completely in alignment with this trick hello????????????
