Kyoto & Kaiseki · Main
Yudofu
- Easy
- 15 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, a sweet edge rounding the corners, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- 600g kinugoshi tofu, the softest you can buy
- 1.5 L soft water
- 20g kombu
- 20g dried shiitake
- 100ml usukuchi shoyu
- 50ml mirin
- 100g daikon, grated and drained
- 2 kujo negi, sliced thin
- 10g ginger, grated
- 1 yuzu, for zest
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
DashiThe wobble & the skewer: testing a bake
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · soy · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Steep the kombu and shiitake in the cold water for an hour. Lift the shiitake out and keep their soaking water; the kombu stays in the pot.
- For the tare, warm 200ml of the shiitake water with the shoyu and mirin until it steams and the raw alcohol smell has gone, then hold it warm in a jug.
- Bring the kombu water to 70 to 75C (158 to 167F): the surface should shiver and throw a thin plume, and never break into bubbles.
- Cut the tofu into 5cm blocks and slide them in. They sink, then rise and sway as they warm through, three to four minutes.
- Lift each block out the moment it floats and wobbles, before any pitting shows on the surface, and serve in the warm tare with daikon, negi, ginger and grated yuzu.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Dashi 29 recipes
- It is clear enough to read the bottom of the pan through it. Cloudiness means it boiled, or the kombu stayed in past the first small bubbles, and neither can be strained out afterwards.
- Pale gold rather than brown, nearer the colour of weak tea. A brown dashi has been cooked too hard or too long and will taste of the pan rather than of the sea.
- The kombu came out before the water reached a simmer, and it is supple rather than slimy. A slippery surface on the sheet means alginates have started to leach, and the broth will feel viscous on the tongue.
- Strained without pressing. Squeezing the flakes or the kelp forces out bitterness and fine particles, and the difference is obvious in the finished bowl.
- Tasted alone it is savoury and faintly sweet with no fishiness and no bitter edge. Fishy means the katsuobushi steeped rather than settling; bitter means heat.
Where it goes wrong Heat, or time, or both. Kombu boiled gives up alginates and turns the broth slippery and faintly bitter; katsuobushi left to steep turns it sour and fishy. Almost every dashi failure is an excess of one of the two things the cook controls, and neither is recoverable once it has happened.
The wobble & the skewer: testing a bake 135 recipes
- Tested at the true centre and the thickest point, not at the convenient edge: the edge is done long before the answer is.
- The skewer comes out as the recipe describes, clean and dry or carrying the stated moist crumb, and it does the same on a second test in a different spot.
- The wobble is read in motion: nudged, the centre moves as one set mass with a faint tremble, rather than a liquid ripple travelling across the surface.
- The other signs agree with the test: risen and just shrinking from the sides, the top set and dry to a light touch with no wet gloss on it.
- Pressed lightly at the middle it springs back and leaves no lasting dent.
Where it goes wrong It was judged on the clock and on how the edges looked, so a centre still liquid went to the rack and sank as it cooled, a dense wet seam under a perfectly browned top.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Nebbiolo (Langhe) or aged Pinot Noir
- Also Right
- White Burgundy for cream-based versions
- From the Taps
- Dubbel
- Zero-Proof
- Roasted barley tea
Earth speaking to earth: forest-floor reds echo fungal depth; truffle and Nebbiolo literally share a hillside and a season.
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