People love to discuss tofu with me. Occupational hazard. It comes with following a mostly plant based diet and a being a nutritionist. And I always answer honestly which is that I often eat it at restaurants and if prepared well, I love it but I just can’t figure out how to make it at home. It’s something that bugs me. So with 2016 came my desire to expand my cooking repertoire and I decided to try a new way to make tofu and this partially had to do with what I already had in my fridge on the snowy night I decided to try to make it. That happened to be a delicious spicy barbeque sauce Pam had picked up for me at the farmers’ market in Huntington, LI this summer. So I googled bbq tofu and came up with a few ways to try it and decided to take all that advice and make it my own. Oh and hope it’s palatable.
Spoiler alert: it was.
Ingredients:
Extra firm tofu
BBQ sauce (you can make your own or store bought)
Tofu is wet and mushy if left it to its own devices, even the extra firm. So I took it out of the package and wrapped it in a dish towel and put a heavy book on top of it. I leave it there for probably a half hour. Then I cut in small cubes and put in a baking pan. That pan will not be used in oven but just to marinate tofu. I poured almost entire jar of barbecue sauce on the tofu pieces and let sit for an hour. During that hour, I rotated the pieces (gently as they fall apart) in the sauce to coat them. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Transfer tofu from baking pan to a baking sheet with tin foil on it to help simplify clean up. Put in oven for 20 minutes. Then rotate tofu (once again gently) and pour more bbq sauce on it and put back in for 20 minutes. At that point I checked it and assumed it would be done but it wasn’t as toasted looking as I wanted and the tofu wasn’t as solid as I was hoping for so I put it back in for another 10 minutes. Then- voila. Delicious firm crispy barbecued tofu!
