Western diets have long focused on dairy and beef products, only recently turning to the soybean for nutritional supplements. But the small bean has always played a leading role in Chinese kitchens. For ages, Chinese infants have been weaned on soybean puree or "milk," and countless Oriental hands have reached for dried soybean snacks. The recipe-adaptable beancurd has surfaced in gourmet dishes from the legendary Yellow Emperor's day forward, enhancing meats, fish, vegetables, and soups. And although whole soy "nuts" and soy flour are also popular products, it is the soy beancurd which has been most relied upon as a delicious, inexpensive, and convenient source of protein; from this gelatinous, bland beginning, a myriad of different textures and flavors can be created—sweet cakes, fried cakes, beancurd preserve, beancurd skin, peppered beancurd, beancurd ad infinitum. "Versatile" is not adjective enough for the soybean.
Typical packets for supermarket coolers.
Beancurd cake or tofu, a simple, loose curd of pureed soybean and water, is virtually impossible to make at home. Grinding the beans, steam-pressure liquefying the puree, and coddling the resulting liquid into gelatinous cakes is a very time consuming, physically demanding task. Therefore, tofu production on the island is confined to commercial kitchens.
In Taipei, the midnight oil burns in tofu kitchens in order to put the "milk" and "meat" on tomorrow's tables. From just after midnight till a little past dawn, the commercial kitchens hum to turn the yellow beans into steaming white cakes—racing the clock to greet the morning's appetites. Kitchen equipment is, of course, on an industrial scale—furnaces, casks, weighted presses, and steam compressors. The misleading image is of a blacksmith's forge rather than a cookery.
Few operations can match the tofu kitchens in rigorous daily routine. In the wee hours of the morning, wiry men, neatly wrapped in white aprons and bright plastic boots, arms ribbed with taut veins and tense muscles, work with merry efficiency.
In a tofu kitchen on Taipei's Hoping East Road, quick as birds, the cooks step artfully around the rivulets of water collecting on the uneven brick floor as they go about their work. The wall clock reads 4:45, and the sky outside is just beginning to lighten as they swing into the night's last batch. But their work light comes mostly from the ceiling-high furnace in the corner. The air is heavy with fragrant steam, the workspace, a collage of wet brick and wood. Sodden wooden tray-molds hold the curd cakes, stacked in wobbling towers in every available space. Varied levels of machinery supported by wooden-legged platforms spread like a gerbil playground over a third of the room. The worn equipment testifies to its intensive use—the small kitchen turns out 250 trays of beancurd on a summer's night, up to 500 per night in the winter months. Diet shifts reduce orders during the hot season.
Quality control is the heart of the matter.
When they arrive at the kitchen, the beans are first soaked in huge plastic containers of cold water. Bucket-wielding workers pour the soaked beans into a waist-high, funnel-shaped machine. Boiling water dripping from a pipe mixes in as the machine begins to grind the beans. In a few moments, a whitish puree pours from the mouth of the funnel into a floor-based bowl. Suddenly, this mush is sucked out through a beneath-the-floor pipe and routed up the back wall to empty into a huge, suspended cauldron. The cauldron sputters and coughs as it receives the mush, then settles into rhythmic, hissing breaths. Working in tandem with the furnace, as the cauldron boils the beans down, it releases great puffs of steam, keeping pace with the fueling of the furnace and its own internal pressure.
As the bean pulp steams in the cauldron, another batch of new beans enters the funnel below. Just before the new load is sucked through the pipe in the floor, a pressure valve on the boiler is opened, and a piping-hot, chalky puree comes streaming from a faucet head into a mixing machine. Buckets of fresh water are hurriedly added to the mash as the arms of the mixing machine begin to turn. The hot, thin liquid produced by the churnings is drained off into a waiting tub, and a worker facing this machine begins to scoop bean liquid from the tub to add to the gritty pulp, this time using no water. In this way, the bean liquid is enriched and thickened. This cycle is repeated many times. At intervals, new bean mash from the cauldron enters the mixer and is splashed with liquid from the tub. Here is the real quality control for tofu. The more the juice is recycled, the richer and more nutritious it becomes.
At last, satisfied with the creamy color of the liquid, a worker opens a tap and the final product is drained into a waist-high tub. Heaved into the center of the workroom, the bean liquid is now ready to be turned into cakes.
Machines of all types enter the process.
Another worker shovels a white powder into the tub and then, with minimal arm movement, churns the liquid into a broiling froth with the shovel. The powder helps the liquid gel and keeps the curd from spoiling or "turning red." As the gel sets, the worker prepares the wooden molds. On a waist-level trough running alongside one wall, he spreads seven or eight wooden trays. Into each, a handkerchief-like cloth is spread to serve as a cheesecloth in a later operation to squeeze excess liquid from the curd.
The worker begins to scoop partly gelled matter from the tub into the prepared molds. His arm moves in a smooth arc, back and forth between molds and tub. The gel tray is wrapped tightly and covered by another wooden mold. Faster than a factory production line, this one man has soon assembled towering stacks of gel-filled molds, all quaking with half-settled curd.
In the process to squeeze excess moisture from the curd, the tray stacks are transported to a weighted press against the front wall. Bound by iron arms and weighted down by heavy stones, the tofu is pressed for about twenty minutes. Then, in the show's final act, the steaming trays are flipped from the stack, unbound, and carted directly to the street, where they await morning shoppers.
By 9:30 a.m., the sun is getting hot and a new day is in full swing. But the tofu kitchen is dark and still. In front of the facility, great bins of beanpulp residue—a by product—wait for employees of pig farms to come haul them away on 3-wheeled carts. By this time, the beancurd cakes have almost sold out. Only a few trays remain against a backdrop of empty molds.
In great works of hot oil, elsewhere in the city, yesterday's cakes are now being fried into chewy squares; and the fresh cakes are inspiring chef after chef to create a grand variety of tasty dishes for the gourmet palates of the restaurant patrons of Taipei.