This isn’t exactly a post about dinner on Monday night - we’ve have various combinations of tofu, salad, and twice baked potatoes before - but instead a post about tofu.

The first time we did tofu in barbeque sauce, I sliced up the tofu into squares, put it into a baking dish, dumped the sauce all over it, and baked it for 20 minutes or so. The results were decent - mostly because of the great quantities of sauce - but less than thrilling. The tofu was pale and bland - everything the anti-tofu camp normally charges it with. (Something I should state upfront: I am fervently in favor of tofu. I love tofu.) So, Monday night I fried the tofu and we dipped it into the sauce, and it was much, much better than the previous effort.

Frying tofu turns out to be much easier than I’d thought. I’d tried before, and all I’d gotten was something that was still pale and still bland, and just a little more oily. That was because I was trying to stir-fry the tofu, pushing it around in the oil in the pan, and that didn’t work. If you want nice brown crispy tofu, like you would get in a restaurant, it has to sit in the oil. I added about 2 tablespoons of oil to a pan on medium, let it heat for a couple of minutes, then added the tofu. (I also pressed the water out of the tofu - putting it into an 8×8 baking dish, putting a plate over it, and putting a couple of cans of tomato sauce on top of that - and that helped quite a bit too.) I let the tofu sit in the oil until it started browning and puffing up on one side (3 or 4 minutes) then flipped the squares onto another side, and repeated the process. In the end, after about 15 minutes, we had tofu that was brown, crispy, and puffy on the outside, and creamy on the inside, just like restaurant tofu. (This process would have gone much faster if we had deep-fried the tofu, but I wasn’t interested in using that much oil.) This also didn’t add substantially to the calorie load of the meal - at 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil, we each got about 60 extra calories in our meals, which was acceptable. All in all, it was extremely tasty, and not that hard to do.