Making tofu in pictures

Due to popular demand, here is a set of photos and explanations on how to make tofu. Enjoy:

(Thanks Sergio and Ieve for the very professional photos!)




STEP 1: Make the soy milk (or cheat... and buy it from the local organic shop ;o))

We use a soyabella milk making machine. You can make all sorts of vegetable "milks" with it and you can get very creative too (adding dates, seeds, banana etc to change the tastes of the milks). All you need to do is buy some soy beans, soak them for 4 hours, put them in the machine, add some water (as per soyabella instructions) and turn the machine on.

(Note, You do not  need a soya milk making machine... you can just make it with a food processor.)

Here is the end result.

STEP 2: filter the milk through some muslin cloth. The milk you buy in the store is likely to have been filtered, but if you make your own, then you will have some residue (we don't mind it for drinking so much, no doubt it is full of goodness, but for tofu making it is not good).

STEP 3: (you can start here if you bought your soy milk!). Put soy milk in a sauce pan and heat. Some people say to heat it to 70C... in all honestly, you can be a bit freestyle and not use a thermometer. We have done it this way both times and it has worked out great,

Just heat the milk, do not let it boil or simmer but make it hot.

STEP 4: put 1 spoon (table spoon) of Nigari in approximately 150ml of water. Dissolve it and pour about half of that solution into the heated soy milk.

More or less straight away you should start seeing the milk curdle slightly, like below:

Continue heating and slowly, you should see the curdling become more obvious (if they don't you may need to add the other half of the Nigari solution):

 STEP 5: Once the soya milk has completely curdled (this means you have a "solid" and a liquid part in the sauce pan), you need to remove the water. This requires some clever utensils like a tofu mold:

which you need to line with a muslin cloth again and put somewhere where water can drain. Such as the arrangement below:

Then it is just a matter of pouring your curdles into the mold and removing the water. At this point, you could become creative and add other stuff like spices, olive oil, olives, chilli etc to make your tofu more exciting.

STEP 6: Press the curdles to make your tofu block. You need to remove as much water as possible. The more water you remove, the firmer the tofu.

STEP 7: take it out and decorate!