Homemade Steamed Egg Tofu

6 September, 2010 Annie 34 Comments

A super-simple, savory steamed dish that you can whip up in a snap.

Remember a while back I blogged about how egg tofu was just such an amazing thing and if you could find it at your Asian grocery store you should nab yourself at least 4 tubes? I even shared a very simple recipe on how you could cook it. Well, after eating loads of that stuff these days (over here, it’s very easy to find and I cook it at least once every two weeks), I found that we could make this simple tofu ourselves. So for those of you out there without access to an Asian grocery store (or if your store just doesn’t carry these things), you can TOTALLY make it yourself.

Two Ingredients

All you need are a few simple ingredients and you’re good to go. Firstly, you will need soybean milk (and please don’t buy the vanilla or chocolate flavors!). Just get plain soybean milk (maybe one day I’ll blog on how you could even make your own fresh soybean milk). Then you’ll need eggs. Other than that, you’ll just need some flavorings–some salt and some chicken bouillon or you could substitute a portion of the soybean milk with chicken broth. Either will work.

That’s all there is to it. Basically, you just need to beat the eggs, mix in the soybean milk with the seasonings and steam the whole thing. Tadah! Egg tofu!

Home-made Egg Tofu Recipe

taken from “Mama Steamed Delicious” by Jamie Jong

Ingredients:
6 eggs
500ml soybean milk (unsweetened and unflavored)
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp chicken bouillon

Method:
1. Break eggs into a big bowl, lightly beat with a fork. Pour in soybean milk.

Soy Milk and Egg for Steamed Egg Tofu

2. Add salt and chicken bouillon. Mix thoroughly.

3. Strain egg mixture into a heat-proof dish.

straining egg mixture for steamed egg tofu

4. Steam over LOW heat for 20 minutes.
5. Serve while hot.

Simple, Right?

So simple, even Nate could do it, right? Wrong! (Sorry, honey, I just have to share this part with our readers). The first time we tried this recipe, Nate was really excited and because it looked so simple, I thought surely, this is going to be no problem for him. He happily beat the eggs, mixed the soybean milk and seasonings, strained all of that into a bowl and put it to steam.

Everything great. He was so excited and really looking forward to a beautiful smooth custard-like tofu dish. The recipe said to steam the tofu for 20 minutes. Now, if you’ve ever looked at our other steamed egg recipe, that one only takes seven minutes of steaming.

Now, if I was making this dish, the instructions for 20 minutes of steaming would have set off some alarm bells in my head and I would have looked at the instructions a little bit more carefully. See…what Nate missed in reading the instruction was that you were to steam this dish over LOW heat for 20 minutes. What he did instead was steam it on high heat for 20 minutes. And what we got at the end of that time is pictured below.

Yeah, wrinkled, ugly and definitely not custard-like in texture. Thankfully, there is always a way to fix ugly food. After all the taste was still pretty good (though texturally it wasn’t as pleasing). What we did was to heat up some sesame oil and vegetable oil in a pan, fry up some minced garlic and sliced shallots along with some red chillies. Pour on some soy sauce, dark soy and a little bit of sugar and pepper, gave it a good stir. Added to this, we sprinkled on some chopped green onion and then ladled this on top of the tofu. Everyone ate it and didn’t even notice the uneven texture (we actually brought it to a party).

Lesson Learned

The second time we made this, we made sure the heat was at the appropriate level. We started the steamer/wok on high heat to get the water boiling, and when the water was letting off steam, we put the bowl of tofu in, and turned the heat to med-low. After 20 minutes, we got this beautiful, evenly textured, smooth custard. Now that was more like it!