Japanese Cuisine- Green Tea Tofu

         For my fifth post, I wanted to try something new; something that I’ve never tasted, nor have I ever heard about it. I want to expand my culminating experience by exploring new tastes, foods, techniques, and skills. Therefore, on this post, I created something called Green Tea Tofu. The name is self-explanatory as to what it is. I was intrigued by this dish because; I questioned how it would taste. Would it be bitter? Sweet? Salty? My curiosity drove me to create this dish myself.

               The dish consists ingredients such as silken tofu, Matcha Green Tea, agar agar powder, and Mirin. This dish isn’t time-consuming; It would take around 10-20 minutes or so. To start this dish, I place the silken tofu in a pot. Then I, “mash the tofu with a potato masher until it’s semi-liquid” (Dekura 77). When it becomes a thick paste, toss in 3 tablespoons of Green Tea powder. Again, continue mashing/mixing the solution until you have a consistent green paste. I messed up the next step, which was adding the agar agar powder. I forgot to mix it in water before adding it in the tofu and heating it up. After the mixture is heated up, strain the mixture through a sieve onto a rectangular mold (Dekura 77). Place the content into a refrigerator for roughly 30 minutes.

               As for the sauce, I used a combination of soy sauce, mirin, and Katsuo Dashi. Allowing the tofu to have a sweet, bitter, and salty taste. Additionally, some accompaniments you can use for this dish is ginger or pickled radish. Since I didn’t like either of those ingredients, I left them out of my dish. I added seaweed onto the tofu in order for it to look better.

               Finally, the dish tasted sweet yet salty (which I didn’t expect), and it seemed not stiff enough. I felt like I could’ve added more agar agar powder in order for it to harden up more. But all in all, I found this dish as a great learning experience, and I tried out a new dish.

So my question to you is: What dishes have you failed on making?

Dekura, Hideo, and Danny Kildare. Contemporary Japanese Cuisine: Classic Recipes, Fresh Flavors. New York: Weatherhill, 2001. Print.