Today I made tofu. Yes I did. It’s something I’ve wanted to try to do for ages and I finally got the time to do it today. I soaked the soy beans overnight (last night)

Then the first step today was to blend up the soaked beans and then boil them up with some extra water in a pot.

Stirring…stirring…still stirring…

Then, after it’s cooked for the allotted time, it gets sieved through some muslin. And thus we have soy milk!

The muslin bag of soy product was quite hot at this stage and I may have *slightly* burnt my hands squeezing all the excess liquid out. Here we see the resulting soy milk.

Incidentally, the soy dregs leftover in the muslin sieve are called okara, and can (and will) be used in other Japanese dishes.
Then the newly made soy milk gets boiled. The best thing about this is, as it is simmering away, a skin forms on the top of the milk. This is skimmed off to make yuba – and it is the best thing ever. Maybe it doesn’t look so great, but with a little soy sauce or sesame salt, it is delicious. In fact, I probably love it more than tofu!

So after it cooks for a while, you add a small amount of Nigari (magnesium chloride) which causes the soy milk to coagulate and curds form.

Then you scoop it in to a mould and weigh it down.

After that, you submerge it in cold water and wait for it to set, voila! There you have it – tofu!

And then it’s ready to eat! I made a firm tofu this time, but next time I’m going to try a softer one – which just involves putting less Nigari in. It turned out delicious!