Wynette Richards

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.)

The Recipe

• 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, finely chopped
• 1/8 cup garlic, minced
• 1 cup apple juice concentrate
• 3 packages of firm tofu (16 oz per package)

1. Heat oven to 250 degrees.
2. Mix all the ingredients except tofu. This creates a marinade.
3. Rinse the tofu. Squeeze with a clean kitchen town to get out some of the water.
4. 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.)
5. Oil the bottom of a big roasting pan.
6. Put the marinade in the bottom of the pan.
7. Stir the tofu in the marinade to evenly coat.
8. Spread the tofu out as much as possible, hopefully to make a single layer if your pan is large enough.
9. Bake in 300 degree oven until the marinade is mostly absorbed, approximately 2 hours.
10. Stir and then spread out evenly again.
11. 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.
12. Cool and then store in a covered container in the refrigerator. Will keep for a week or more. But ours never lasts that long!

Variations I might try (not yet tried, so try at your own risk!):

1. Substitute coconut amines for some of the apple juice.