There is a tofu factory fairly close to me (about 20 minutes away), and so I can go there if I want fresh tofu. There used to be a Hawaiian market even closer to me when I lived in Venice that made tofu on site, but they closed quite a few years ago when the owners decided to retire.

Kevin used to make tofu, and I'll ask him how he did it. I prefer to go to the tofu factory myself - is there one near you? They may be able to give you some advice or help.

Dotch TV had a show featuring a tofu factory in Japan - I think you can find that show on Youtube.

I'll look for a tofu factory.

I'm interested in making tofu with embedded flavoring and/or coloring. Fried tofu always tastes kind of bland on the inside, to me. The exterior can be tasty but I'd like the inside to be interesting too.

Daughter-san made several colors of hummus this weekend (for her food blog, of course). We made "Neapolitan hummus". I'm curious if the same thing can be done with tofu.

One of my best friends has a new boyfriend. I am thinking of making them, as a joke, a gay pride "rainbow" platter with colored hummus or tofu. Green, red, yellow are no problem. But I need to be able to make light blue, medium blue, and deep purple. Blueberry hummus or tofu sounds, err, incongruent. But maybe I can use purple potatoes.

Never made tofu but I have about japanese tofu making. I think they used a very special coagulent and made very delicately flavored tofu. It sounded impossibly lovely and elegant and like I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. A google search says Nigari - I do not know if that for the prosaic or elegant version of tofu - or how easy it is to purchase.

A childhood friend lives in an intentional community where they make tofu. I asked him but I wouldn't necessarily expect an answer in a timely fashion.

I second Lars' advice.

I've been to Hawthorne/Gardena tofu factories and they put the store bought versions to shame. Simply sublime.

Magnesium chloride (nigari), calcium chloride, calcium sulfate or an acid like vinegar or lemon juice. I have not made it, but did research it in preparation for my own batch.

Much store bought tofu is pasteurized --- fresh is so much better.

I have 3 lb organic soybeans soaking, and a 2 lb bag of epsom salt on the kitchen counter. I only need a couple tbsp of the latter, but hopefully I can convince SWMBO of the benefits of an epsom salt bath. Apparently the grocery store doesn't sell little vials of the stuff. Maybe they think people will smoke it.

Yes, fresh IS so much better. Nice challenge.

I also made humus this past weekend. Sweet pea cilantro.

I have some veggie powders for rainbow foods. Beet root and tomato. Matcha and spinach. And as you know turmeric. I have the IndiaTree dyes but expensive. Simmering blueberry skins then puree with a whiter bean like a small white bean, white rice. Goat cheese. (the chick peas kill the blue)

(i made a savory rainbow dip a few yrs ago)

"Red Cabbage-
Red cabbage is the most common natural blue food coloring here in the States. Cooked red cabbage leaves will eventually turn bluish purple if soaked in a slightly basic solution. To make a blue food dye, slice up red cabbage leaves and boil for 10-15 minutes. Strain out the cabbage, reduce the liquid until it is thick and syrupy (the cooking liquid from a whole cabbage will reduce to about a quarter of a cup. Now you have an intensely purple syrup. Add just the tiniest pinch of baking powder (you really have to go slowly here or you can turn the whole batch green). Keep adding baking soda in very small amounts until the color just turns blue. It is important to add only enough baking soda not only for the color, but for the flavor. Small amounts of baking soda have a negligible effect on taste, but add to much and it will taste terrible. Now you have a blue dye, As unappetizing as boiled cabbage and baking soda sounds, the flavor of the dye really is not that pronounced. Use it with a light touch to add blue to icings, cake batters and cookies. but remember that the color can still change. If you add it to an acidic food, it will go right back to purple."...blue food

Thank you! I never heard of that trick.

Oh, one thing to add. I just used a fine chiffonade of maybe 4 cups of the dark soft outer leaves in just a cup or two of water on simmer for about an hour. Let it cool down, then strain and reduce. I did not need a huge amount at all. No need to make such a huge amount. (used the rest of the cabbage for a rainbow slaw)

I put sticky rice between the layers of color. Still cannot think of anything else to keep the layers looking fresh....something nice and white. And have a neutral flavor. Definitely a step up from most veggie pate i've had. Did not think to try a white corn polenta tinted. I did try blue corn flour tinted but it was still a bit grey-blue. I used a pullman pan. Mine has sides that fold down.

Now you have me wanting to make one again.

That was easy. No idea how it tastes yet.

And here is my home made press

Pressing the soy milk from the cooked soy puree was messy. I'm thinking next time I'll use my juicer to do it. Otherwise, the process was straightforward. Tofu is cooling in the refrigerator. If it tastes okay, next batch will be more experimental.

I don't know what tempeh is. I'll look it up.

It's a fermented soybean cake, very much an acquired taste (and I'm trying!). If you find a way to make it palpable, please share!!

I wonder what one does with the solids leftover after the milk is pressed out. This is a dry, tasteless, crumbly, white stuff. Apparently very nutritious, no doubt excellent for animal feed, but it's culinary uses escape me. You get quite a bit of it. That block of tofu was three lb of dry soybeans. It is called okara, which is a Japanese word that means drywall compound.

My Japanese friend makes her own tofu and okara (honorary pulp) is a prized remnant. Here's some suggestions: http://justhungry.com/2006/04/milking_the_soy.html

http://www.motherearthnews.com/real-food/okara-recipes-healthy-vegetarian-cooking-zmaz83sozshe.aspx

Those are great ideas. I'll try to use the next batch of okara from my next tofu session.

The process needs to be faster, I think. Basically, this is what I did.

- Soak dry soybeans overnight

- Put drained soybeans and water in blender (I ended up with 3 cups soaked soybeans to 2 cups water) and puree

- Cook puree over medium-low heat until it is foamy and just barely bubbling, avoid scorching the puree at the bottom of the pot if you can

- Press the soy milk from the puree, which I did with cheesecloth and a colander, you end up with milk and the oft-discussed okara

- Cook the milk until almost boiling, 180F is recommended in some recipes I found, and I used a double boiler

- Mix 1 tbsp epsom salt with 1/2 cup boiling water

- Turn off the heat, add a little of the epsom salt mixture to the puree, give it a single gentle stir, wait ten minutes, come back and give another single stir, the milk should coagulate. If not, add a little more epsom salt mixture and repeat, until the milk is well coagulated

- Line the tofu press with cheesecloth, pour in the coagulated portion of the milk, cover with cheesecloth, put on the lid of the press, and put something about 15-20 lb on the lid and wait an hour (this is for firm tofu)

- My press is basically a wood box with no top or bottom, then removable bottom and top that fit loosely in the box, leaving room for liquid to escape, bashed together from 3/4" ash scrap, which took half an hour in my garage

- Remove tofu, unwrap cheesecloth, place tofu in cold water and refrigerate

Pressing the soy milk from the cooked soy puree takes too long and is messy. I would like to find a better way. I might use my juicer. Or build another press, larger, with small holes for the milk to escape.

My next batches of tofu will include some experimentation with flavoring. I'm thinking about trying a flavorful liquid in one batch, some spicy salty gingery stuff, and maybe another batch with some sort of veg (browned mushroom? dunno).

It appears to be no cheaper to make tofu than to buy it, so to make this really worthwhile, I would like to produce something different from plain tofu.

I also need to make more tofu form/presses, or one that will form and press a few blocks of tofu at once. This is a couple hour process and producing just a single block is, well, not really bang for the buck.

Looks great! Maybe you should also try the silken style as well and teach us.

The traditional recipe made with okara is unohana -- sort of treating the fluff like quinoa. But there are many other uses as well.

http://www.japanfoodaddict.com/vegetables/okara-unohana/

LOL!! Drywall compound. Of course it was named after the soy solids, but it's still funny. :)

Nannygoat, I've never been brave enough to try to make tempeh. When it's cooked right it's actually delicious, but I'm no dab hand at the cooking either. You can make tempehs out of other beans but they're hard to find commercially. There's a product that is called tempeh, but is made of hemp that's actually pretty good.

Went antiquing (junking, really) and picked these up. Both have potential uses for my tofu education, I think.

The shiny thing is a heavy duty press. I figure this should make short work of pressing soy milk from okara. $9 seemed a reasonable risk to take.

The book is from the Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, CA. Tofu, the "Protein source of the future . . . Now!". In 1975, maybe.

Say, what is the deal with people saying we shouldn't eat too much soy? Why, and what is too much?

What I'm reading makes soy sound pretty good for you. E.g.:

http://www.pcrm.org/health/health-topics/soy-and-your-health

Soy is known as having a lot of plant estrogens. Menopausal women eat a lot of edamame to help their symptoms while their bodies get used to the hormone decrease. That's part of it. Mothers of young boys are particularly careful about it. Breast cancer survivors also avoid soy for this reason.

Another part is that it's generally said that all US soy is GMO whether deliberately or by drift, so it depends on how you feel about GMO and Round Up. The way to avoid that is to buy organic (by definition, non-GMO). Or if it's a soy product, there's also an organization that does non-GMO certification for soy that doesn't meet the stronger organic standards.

I think the biggest thing is that soy has become as ubiquitous as wheat in the food industry, and is in all sorts of unexpected products, so you really have to pay attention, unless you're Annie growing almost everything at home, to know just how much you're actually eating. You shouldn't have fish for three meals a day, if you have a choice, because of the lack of iron and presence of toxins from pollutants. Similarly, you shouldn't live on only soy, but it can be a healthy component of your diet. If you want to use a lot of plant proteins, trading off with things like tempeh and saitan, can bring some variety.

My takeaway is that soy, in it's purest non-GMO forms, is beneficial (and that includes tempeh). However, as plllog points out, processed forms should be avoided.

A friend cautioned me to only buy organic soybeans, perhaps for this reason. Which I'm doing.

Yeah, there were fears about plant estrogens and the results of some animal studies. (But being a man, you aren't afraid of a little breast development and other side effects, right?). I believe all the studies are underway. I do note the advice of those that warn about soy protein isolates, which are a concentrated form of the things you'd probably want to limit -- even non GMO.

Just a reminder to READ THOSE LABELS. Really disheartening how ubiquitous they are:(

Batch #2 in progress.

I tried using my juicer to separate the milk from the puree. Sort of worked. I also tried using the big hand press shown above. That worked about as well. Neither was a particularly streamlined process, though both were better than twisting the puree in cheesecloth.

As for the experimentation, I decided to try adding stuff that I'd typically cook tofu with. So I made a mix of garlic, ginger, scallions, salt, a little white pepper, a little cayenne, sake, water, cooked that until the garlic was starting to brown, and mixed this into the curd before loading the tofu press.

We'll see how it turns out.

Well that sounds exciting! I don't think I've ever had tofu that was flavored in the making. For sure not recently. I'm all agog!

Gotta watch what you feed the bacteria that does the fermenting. This will be interesting. I have to laugh about tofu concerns considering all the other estrogen-mimics we blithely expose ourselves to. Like you say John, I can't imagine anyone overdoing it on eating tofu, but I guess it could happen. My brother is mildly allergic to soy, so he becomes pretty aware of how ubiquitous soy and soy by products are.

I guess its the soy thing because of all the lazy vegetarians/vegans who live on soy protein and the doctors worrying about what they're feeding their kids.

Soy protein isolate intake should be worrisome for the athletic community as well. It's a major ingredient in many products geared towards that crowd.

Kevin has almost the same book in your photo; his is The Book of Tofu & Miso, special 2001 edition. On page 99, it gives the recipe for homemade tofu and says that you can use clean natural seawater, if you can find it, to make natural nigari. Kevin's book contains The Book of Tofu and The Book of Miso into one edition. It looks like it should give you all the info you need.

Sigh. There was apparently beginners luck at work in my first batch. Subsequent batches have not had the same texture or firmness. So I'm going back to the drawing board, need to be able to make tofu of consistent texture before I try flavored batches.

So sorry to hear it! Do you know where the difference is? Perhaps the little hand made press was the source of good? Slight difference in times or ingredients? Just scaling up?