Gourmand Dietary Culture

Tofu Pizza

vesta No. 76

Mabo tofu pizza (left) fermented tofu pizza (right)

Practical cooking books should not be left in the study. They should be on stand in the kitchen. This belief is why there are so many cooking books occupying the corner of my kitchen cupboard. For many years, I've been in the custom of scanning recipes before cooking, to get a sense of cooking techniques. It's only in the last 2 to 3 years, that I have considerably reduced the frequency with which I reference these cookbooks in my kitchen. That's because I've stopped cooking according to recipes. Usually, I now cook based on ideas that arise when I look in my fridge to see what I've got left as cooking ingredients, rather than through looking at a cookbook. My friends who cook have suggested I should hang up a board of "creative cooking," for whenever I discover a new recipe. But, as an amateur, the stuff I make off the top of my head is usually more like "bullshit cooking."
One item of "bullshit cooking" I've been cooking a lot recently, is pizza. I've started to enjoy eating pizza alongside cheap red wine. I don't really drink wine in order to enjoy the pizza, so much as make pizza as a pretext for drinking wine. I don't knead and bake the pizza dough. I buy readymade pizza bases or Mexican tacos, usually used for making tortillas, frozen at the supermarket. Tacos are quite thin, so they don't really fill you up, and they're small enough to go in a toaster. Regular pizzas are usually cooked in the oven, smothered in tomato sauce, vegetables or meat, and cheese. But when you cook pizza according to your mood, to go with alcohol, anything goes.
I've tried out all sorts... leftover curry or stew pizza, natto pizza, small fish boiled in soy sauce [tsukudani] or salted fish [shiokara] pizza... but the one that I've liked the most is tofu pizza. As Professor Gourmand, my weight bothers me. I decided to try using tofu, which is good for your health, in place of cheese, which is high in calories. I smash up drained tofu, and add a little olive oil to mellow the flavour, then I mix this with salted shrimp, and spread it on the pizza base. Then I just add meat, like ham or bacon, or chopped-up eel or conger eel grilled in soy sauce, or kimchi, or whatever else takes my fancy, and cook it.
Sometimes I replace cheese with fermented tofu. There are several types of fermented tofu: fūrū(腐乳), nanrū(南乳), and dōfūrū(豆腐乳). It is made by adding malted rice to tofu, and then fermenting it in salty water, so the flavor is a combination of fermented and salty. I buy it from a Chinese food shop and use it smashed up instead of cheese. It gives a distinctive flavor. The left-hand pizza in the photo above is made using some mabo tofu I had lying around, to which I added a little cheese, and then fresh coriander after I had cooked it. The right-hand one is covered in fermented tofu, with red pepper and soft salami sausage added to it. I'll leave the taste of them to your imagination.
Having invented many pizzas that you couldn't find in a restaurant, I was proudly content with myself. But then I was told that "stuff like curry pizza isn't rare, it's sold in the shops." I was still sure tofu pizza was my original creation. But the thought bothered me, so I ran an internet search for the keywords "tofu pizza." And there it was, it existed. There were around 40,000 hits! Mashing tofu and mixing it with mayonnaise to make a paste was one technique; thinly slicing drained tofu and dusting it in flour to use as an ingredient for pizza was another. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's words in The Physiology of Taste are certainly true: "The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity than the discovery of a new star." The thing I came up with was something anyone could have come up with!


Translated with support by Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan

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