“Wait—doesn’t tofu just come from plastic boxes at Trader Joe’s?”

This was the response we got from several otherwise intelligent, food-literate people when we informed them that we were going to try to make tofu from scratch.

After a long period of uber-unpopularity (outside the realm of Doug), this jiggly white workhorse of the kitchen has finally received some grudging acceptance within the mainstream as of late—it’s versatile, it’s cheap, it’s relatively ethical and it takes a lot longer to go bad in the fridge than a piece of chicken. But many people still don’t really understand what the hell it is, nor are they particularly curious about finding out. For American eaters, tofu just…is.

Not so in Asia, where tofu-making is a tradition that goes back thousands of years. (No one’s actually sure when or how it began, although we did enjoy thinking about the sequence of events that could have led the Prometheus of tofu to create this bizarre bean curd—a process that is way, way more complicated than making fire.)

Tofu-making shares some interesting characteristics with cheese-making—we even saw it referred to as formaggio cinese, or “Chinese cheese,” while traveling through Italy. And though it requires a lot of work, it yields three very useful products: soymilk, tofu and okara, which we’ll return to in just a minute.

To make tofu, you follow a few (okay, a lot of) basic steps:

1)    Procure dried soybeans and soak them in water until they plump up. We found ours at See Sun Market in Chinatown, where they are $0.75 per 340-gram packet (about 2 cups). Suggested soaking times vary from 6 hours to 2 days depending on your recipe.

2)    Mash up the soybeans, either with a mortar and pestle or a food processor.

3)    Boil them. Suggested boiling times vary from 10 to 30 minutes depending on your recipe.

4)    Strain the mix of beans and liquid through a cloth. The liquid left over is (theoretically) soymilk; the ground up soybean leftovers make okara.

5)    Take the hot soymilk and add a chemical coagulant to the mix that will cause it to curdle. (This is where tofu starts to resemble cheesemaking—to make simple cheeses like ricotta, you boil cow’s milk, then add an acid like lemon juice or rennet, which causes the milk to form curds. These are then strained through a piece of porous cloth, making yummy fresh cheese.)

In Asia, the most commonly-used coagulant is nigari (in Japan) or lushui (in China), a powder made from evaporated seawater that contains magnesium chloride. But it’s tough to get this in the States—it’s only available online in most places. So some cooks use Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate), which costs about a buck at CVS. (Since we are poor and lazy, we chose the latter option.)

6)    Once the curds form, strain the soymilk again and form the curds into whatever shape you want. The more coagulant you use, the firmer the tofu gets.

7)    Eat!

Unfortunately, we were not able to produce soymilk or tofu our first time around. Or our second time around. Our milk was too thin, the Epsom salts turned the liquid to foul-tasting brine, and things just didn’t… coagulate.

There are many mistakes that could have led to our tofailure. Perhaps we didn’t soak the soybeans enough—or perhaps we soaked them for too long. Perhaps we didn’t break them down thoroughly enough—modern potato mashers and Cuisinarts weren’t designed for carrying out ancient Asian traditions, after all. Perhaps we could have been more exact in our measurements of mass, time, or temperature. It might also have helped for us to be standing in a kitchen in a Japanese ryokan, surrounded by expert chefs and endless supplies of nigari and fresh soybeans, too. Honestly, we have no idea. When you’re working from a recipe you picked up whilst farming in Hokkaido you can’t exactly call your mom for help. (Unless your mom lives on a farm in Hokkaido.)

But the Full House-esque lesson here is that we still learned something. We did the best with what we had—a tiny urban kitchen, an array of decidedly American tools and ingredients, and two undisciplined cooks with wandering attention spans and dubious math skills. We didn’t shy away from making something that was complicated, time-consuming and foreign. We approached the project in the same way that five year olds approach a box of finger paints, not as a matter of life or death. (In this writer’s opinion, this is the main difference between people who say they “can” cook and people who say they “can’t”—what Flour baker extraordinaire Joanne Chang once identified as a “willingness to try things and flub up.”)

And as a result, we were rewarded with a funny story and a whole lot of okara—not a bad deal. So we chose to focus on that and make something of it.

Perhaps due to its simplicity and neutral taste, okara is a food that so far has defied the Trader Joes-ification of the foreign food market. You’ll rarely see it gracing a Boston menu, and even your hippie-est friends probably don’t know how to make it or even pronounce it. (It’s OH-ka-ruh, not oh-KAH-ruh, bee tee dubs.) But as a healthy grain substitute, okara pretty much rocks. It’s high in fiber and iron, with less calories and carbs than polenta or quinoa, and more protein than brown rice. And like tofu and soymilk, it functions as an effective blank canvas for almost any recipe, whether you’re preparing it traditionally with soy sauce and ginger or mixing it into an unholy veggie burger blend and topping it with good ol’ Heinz ketchup.

So if you, too, find yourself attempting to make tofu (which we heartily encourage you to do) and get hungry along the way—or if you find yourself in the throes of tofailure—you can buck the hell up and make yourself one of these tasty snacks. Or, just screw the tofu-making to begin with and boil up some okara anytime you’re running low on cash and/or want to bring something different to your next hipster dinner party. Dried soybeans keep forever, and boiled okara will keep for a few days. (Keep it a few weeks and it might even become natto—but that’s a story for another day.)

TRADITIONAL OKARA PREPARATION (VEGAN)

Adapted from a recipe from EllensKitchen.com

1 cup okara, steamed

1 carrot, grated or sliced thin

1 cup shiitake mushrooms (use fresh, or soak dried shiitake mushrooms in water for 30 min and reserve the water to add to the mix later)

3 green onions, chopped

½ cup vegetable stock

1 teaspoon sesame oil

Mirin (rice wine vinegar), soy sauce, white sugar to taste

Optional: sliced seitan, chicken, squid

Preparation:

1)    Cut up the vegetables into desired shapes.

2)    Heat the sesame oil on low heat.

3)    Saute the vegetables til they’re almost soft.

4)    Add the okara, sauté.

5)    Add the vegetable stock, stir.

6)    Add mirin, soy sauce, sugar to taste.

7)    Garnish with green onions.

8)    Eat!

GRINGO OKARA VEGGIE BURGERS

1 cup okara, steamed

1 cup vegetables of your choice (anything that’s sitting in the fridge, waiting to be used up)

1 tbs oil (olive oil, canola oil, sesame oil, your call)

1 tbs spices to taste (see below for suggestions)

3-5 tbs flour (wheat flour, oat flour, rice flour are preferable to white flour, but use what you’ve got)

Optional: soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, cumin, chili powder, lemon pepper, bread crumbs, cornflakes, other crunchy crunch items to taste

Preparation:

1)    Saute the vegetables in the oil for about 5-10 min.

2)    Add the okara, sauté 2-4 min longer.

3)    Gradually add flour until the mix begins to bind together and you can shape it into patties.

4)    Cook the patties.

5)    Serve with traditional burger accouterments (pickles, mustard), neo-hippy favorites (avocado, sprouts), yuppie add-ons (artichokes, garlic aoli), or multicultural condiments like tzatsiki or spicy hummus.

6) Eat!

–Ryan Weaver