TacoCat (kinda) Cooks! #44: Healthy Savoury Japanese Mapo Tofu 😋

taco.cat (67)in #food • 2 months ago

Hey Steemit!

We're back with more of our home cooking! If you're unfamiliar with this series, it's where I showcase some of the food we've been making at home since we've been cooking a lot nowadays! Both because it's cheaper and also healthier to cook for yourself compared to eating out. While I usually stick to the usual recipes I do like to try new ones once in a while and figured I'd share the new ones I've tried.

So on one of our recent trips to Japan, we bought some sauces back so I could try and cook different things at home! One of the sauces we bought back was this mapo tofu one since both of us really like mapo tofu.

If you're unfamiliar, Mapo Tofu is a popular Chinese dish from Sichuan Province, and the signature spice of the region––the Sichuan Peppercorn––gives dishes a unique “numbing” effect. Tofu and minced porked is stir fried into the special sauce and the result is a spicy, numbing, savoury dish that numbs your tongue so it can take more heat!

Source: cookerru

Although the unique thing about this dish is the numbing aspect, neither Sean nor I actually like the numbing sensation. We much prefer the spice part of the sauce and how it combines well with tofu. I posted my version of mapo tofu using our local sauce packet here a while ago and we still cook it quite regularly at home, but I'm always on the lookout for different mapo tofu sauces to try.

This Japanese mapo tofu sauce looked quite legit, and upon opening it I was surprised to see there were quite a few sachets inside. I guess it had two portions and one portion was to be shared among 3 people. What a good deal then!

The instructions were in Japanese but after using Google translate, these were the instructions. It seemed simple enough.

These were the ingredients I used for the tofu. I always make sure to put in plenty of vegetables in my dishes but they're optional.

For the tofu:

2 boxes of silken tofu (300g each)
red spinach
enoki mushrooms
pak choi

I also made rice to along with the tofu of course, and I put lots of vegetables in my rice as well.

For the rice:

carrots
broccoli
shimeiji mushrooms
shiitake mushrooms
3 cups of white rice

Step 1: Wash and cut all the vegetables and mushrooms.

Step 2: Wash the rice, add water, broccoli and mushrooms and cook it in the rice cooker.

Step 3: In a pot of boiling water, add in the enoki mushrooms, spinach, pak choi and tofu.

Step 4: Following the instructions on the box, we dissolve the thick powder with 2 tablespoons of water.

Step 5: Add in the spicy mapo tofu sauce into the pot, making sure there's not too much water lest it get diluted since it's a sauce and not a soup.

Step 6: Turn off the heat, stir in the thickening powder solution bit by bit until it's well incorporated.

My tofu pieces broke up a bit but we don't mind and by the end it looked something like this:

By then the rice was also ready just in time!

So it ready to serve! We scooped the mapo tofu on top of our rice so the sauce would mix in with the rice as well.

It looked and smelled just like the mapo tofu we had in Japan. Although their version is definitely on the milder side compared the authentic mapo tofu, it doesn't really have the numbing taste so we actually like it more.

The sauce packet said it was Medium spice but it wasn't spicy at all. Granted, Japanese food is not really known for spice so that's a given. It was still very tasty and savoury though! The sauce blended well with the tofu and vegetables and had more than enough flavour. The mushrooms also provided some nice texture but didn't overpower the sauce in any way.

I definitely would've liked it to be spicier but it was still very delicious and reminded me of the mapo tofu we had in this chain restaurant called Osaka Ohsho in Japan.

I think the one I made is definitely a lot healthier though. But it still tasted yummy all the same! Now I regret not buying more of the sauce but I'm hoping we can find something similar in a Japanese supermarket here. If you have such sauces in your supermarket definitely give it a try!

Thanks so much for reading!