Christine’s Slow-Baked Tofu
This is so good. Christine’s original recipe calls for 24 hours of marinating and then drying in a food dehydrator for 15 hours, but we’ve found you can just slow-bake the tofu in the marinade and then let it bake a while longer till the tofu is dense and chewy. Much faster and easier. (Although still takes about 8 hours.)
Ingredients
- 5/8 cup soy sauce (you can replace 1/8 cup of this with fish sauce if you like)
- 1/2 cup sesame seeds (or even more if you really like sesame seeds)
- 1/4 cup sesame oil (you can use toasted sesame oil for some of it)
- 1/2 tsp. black pepper
- 1/2 cup onion, very finely chopped
- 1/8 cup garlic, minced
- 1 cup apple juice concentrate
- 3 packages of firm tofu (16 oz per package)
Instructions
- Heat oven to 300 degrees.
- Mix all the ingredients except tofu. This creates a marinade.
- Rinse the tofu. Squeeze with a clean kitchen town to get out some of the water.
- Slice each cake of tofu into 8 slices and then cut each slice into about 8 bite-size pieces. (To make about 64 bite-size pieces per cake of tofu.)
- Oil the bottom of a big roasting pan.
- Put the marinade in the bottom of the pan.
- Stir the tofu in the marinade to evenly coat.
- Spread the tofu out as much as possible, hopefully to make a single layer if your pan is large enough.
- Bake in 300 degree oven until the marinade is mostly absorbed, approximately 2 hours.
- Stir and then spread out evenly again.
- Reduce heat to 250 degrees and bake until tofu is firm and “dry” and chewy. Stir every hour or so, more often toward the end. It might take 4 or more hours.
- Cool and then store in a covered container in the refrigerator. Will keep for a week or more. But ours never lasts that long!