Tofu was Re: [Sca-cooks] vegetarian

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Stefan li Rous:
>as well. Could this tofu be made more liquid to resemble aspic? Or
>perhaps if you made the tofu, make it intentionally thinner? Or is
>there another, better substitute?

Tofu being, like gelatin, a protein matrix of sorts, there's going to
be a point of thinness where it is no longer tofu. As with making
cheese, either the milk has curdled or it hasn't, so there will be
some ways in which tofu doesn't behave like gelatin, primarily in
that it can't really be melted and reformed (say, easily molded) as
gelatin can.

>>Ther'es lots to tofu, it is such a versatile ingredient, it is
>>fantastic.  BUT, it is NOT a meat substitute.  Merely an alternative.
>
>Not only is the tofu which I have had soft, but it is also has a very
>uniform, very artifical texture. Does the hard tofu suffer from
>this as well? Many meat eaters, myself included, find the very
>finely ground meats, such as many bolognas to be unappetizing because
>of this texture differance. Sort of like the "Wonderbread" of the
>meat world. Or does the textured vegetable product stuff solve
>this problem?

One thing you may find is that Japanese or Japanese-style tofu
products, as a rule, have a very smooth texture, while Chinese-style
bean curd (basically the same thing in most respects), is somewhat
more coarse and grainy in texture. My own preference (which I mention
as an example of the differences, not because I think people should
care) is for the Japanese-style (often called Silken Tofu) for
raw/cold dishes, and the Chinese stuff ,which comes in several
increments in the gamut between "soft" and "firm", not to mention
various pressed and semi-dried and/or seasoned blocks, plus sheets --
made by skimming off the surface of boiled bean "milk" -- both dried,
rolled up as bean curd "sticks" or foo jook in Cantonese, or sold
frozen in pliable, leathery sheets, used as wrappers for various
vegetable rolls, for cooking and eating hot. You can also buy bean
curd (presumably Japanese as well as Chinese-type products) fried; it
puffs up and looks just a bit like pork rinds ;-).

TVP (although I confess I have extremely limited exposure to this
product) seems to be more or less the same thing as gluten. I guess
it is dried in a sort of coarse granulated form, and it seems to be
the basis for stuff like Hamburger Helper. Gluten overall tends to be
slightly spongy, but I could see how, if ground similarly to ground
beef, it could be made to resemble ground beef; there's a canned
Chinese product I can get locally, a noodle sauce traditionally from
the Beijing area which is commonly made with ground pork; the canned
product is vegetarian, made with ground gluten. It is not actively
deadly.

OTOH, I think the texture problem you mention (as is the larger
difficulty of viewing such foods as "meat substitute" rather than as
"food") is simply a matter of entrenched preconceived notions. For
example, that annoying homogeneous texture you object to in bologna
is highly prized in Mortadella di Bologna, a smoothly-textured
sausage (except with the addition of chunks of fat for moisture and
texture variegation, plus the odd nut, usually pistachios, but
sometimes pignoles, and some peppercorns) which is aged, and treated
with a similar degree of respect in Italy, as, say, prosciutto. It
probably makes a difference, as with prosciutto, to eat this stuff in
paper-thin slices, and there are numerous German, French, and other
sausages made and eaten in a similar way, and nobody has a problem
with their texture. They are the texture they are supposed to be, and
either you like them or you don't ;-). Unfortunately, some rather
nasty things _could_ go into such a sausage and it would be hard to
tell if that were the case, but that texture isn't conceived with
that in mind; it's just an unfortunate side-effect that the
unscrupulous can take advantage of.

Adamantius

--
"No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes
deserves to be called a scholar."
	-DONALD FOSTER