The Trick To Making Restaurant-Quality Tofu Is Actually Super Easy

Whenever I cook with tofu at home, it’s often in ground form; a dumpling filling, or replacement for ground meat in a red sauce. Every time I try to slice it into cubes for a stir fry or soup, it falls short of what I’m really after—that meaty, chewier texture that soaks up sauces and drippings and whatever else you cook it in, a texture that almost looks flaky when you cut the cubes in half and look inside. Tofu tastes this way in a lot of dishes you can find in Chinese restaurants, and until now I alway figured the tofu used by these restaurants was a specialty product, something I’d have to know to look for at an Asian supermarket.

So I was pretty delighted to see Toronto Star culture reporter Karon Liu post this dish as part of an Instagram recipe series he’s been doing on pantry-friendly cooking:

Click through to the next image on his Instagram post, and you’ll see all the lovely little air pockets in the tofu, just soaking up all of that peanut broth. It turns out, all I’d needed this whole time to get that texture was my freezer.

As Liu explains, even the firmest of tofu has a lot of water in it, which expands during freezing and leaves plenty of air bubbles behind when the tofu is thawed and the water is squeezed out. What you end up with is a slightly spongy, firmer product that holds up better in cooking and takes to marinades really well. I happened to have a block of medium-firm tofu sitting in the fridge when I saw Liu’s post, and tried it that day.

Here’s what it looked like before freezing. I cut it into four large cubes and put them in a plastic container before freezing.

And here’s what it looked like the next day, after I thawed it and pressed the water out (there was a lot more water than I expected).

After this, I cut the large cubes into smaller cubes and used them in a stir fry, and they were delicious: a little denser, way saucier, and with plenty of bite. The only things I’d do differently the next time around is slice the tofu down to the size I plan on cooking them in before freezing, to cut down on thawing time, and maybe wrap the tofu in cheesecloth to prevent freezer burn.

Freezing before cooking may seem like an extra step when thinking about how to use tofu in a recipe, but I don’t think it has to be. The next time I pick up a block from the grocery store, I know exactly where it’s going to get stored—and it isn’t the fridge. Thanks, Karon!