Hey Hive!
We're back with more of our home cooking! If you're unfamiliar with this series, it's where I showcase some of the food we've been making at home since we've been cooking a lot nowadays! Both because it's cheaper and also healthier to cook for yourself compared to eating out. While I usually stick to the usual recipes I do like to try new ones once in a while and figured I'd share the new ones I've tried.
If you've seen my other recipe posts before, you'd know that we eat a lot of tofu. Mostly because it's both healthy and cheap here, and makes it easy for us to do a vegetarian day at least once a week. So I'm always on the lookout for tofu recipes and sauces to try, especially when we travel.
On one of our recent trips to Korea, I found this sauce packet for Tofu Stew in their supermarket. It was pretty cheap since it's their in-house brand, but since Sean really liked Korean tofu stew I thought it was worth trying.
Unfortunately the instructions are all in Korean but thankfully we always have Google Translate.
This is what the pack says after translating. Most of it is just the ingredients but the first two lines do have cooking instructions and it seemed pretty easy. All we have to do is mix water with the sauce and boil for about 4 minutes or so, essentially.
I like to mix in a lot of vegetables every time I cook with tofu since it's our 'vegetarian' day. So for this I prepared my usual rice with carrots and frozen broccoli, and I also added some spinach in with the tofu, along with some enoki mushrooms.
These were the ingredients I used:
For the rice:
- carrots
- frozen broccoli
- 3 cups of rice
For the tofu:
- carrot
- spinach
- enoki mushrooms
- tofu
- egg tofu
- tofu sauce
Step 1: Prepare the vegetables; chop the carrots and spinach and separate the enoki mushrooms into smaller bunches.
Step 2: Wash the rice, and once the water is clear, dump the carrots and the frozen broccoli in and cook them altogether in the rice cooker.
Unfortunately I don't have a picture of the rice before it is cooked so here's one from a previous post I did.
Step 3: While the rice is cooking, prepare the tofu by cutting them into bite sized pieces. Then boil the spinach and enoki mushrooms together in a pot of water. Once the veggies have softened up, add in the tofu.
Tofu can get overboiled which might alter its texture so if you want to preserve that silky soft texture, make sure not to overboil it.
Step 4: Once the tofu has boiled, add in the tofu stew sauce and let it simmer for a bit until the stew is well combined.
I did have a bit too much water in the pot before I added in the stew unfortunately, so I did have to let it boil out for a little bit, but once it did it looked and smelled pretty good!
By then the rice had cooked as well so it was perfect and time to serve!
We loaded up our plates with rice and doused it with the tofu stew so the rice would absorb the sauce and add more flavour to it.
It tasted really yummy! Although I didn't add any seafood or meat, the stew sauce already had a seafood taste to it, probably because of the clam concentrate and clam extract in it. But we thought it was fine, and added more dimension to the dish.
The tofu was soft and the vegetables complemented the sauce really well. It was a pretty simple dish but the sauce had so much flavour to it that I didn't need to add anything else. Unlike Chinese tofu sauces this one wasn't spicy at all and was just full of seafood flavour. Even Sean who's not a shellfish fan really enjoyed it.
Overall, this dish was definitely a winner! We were surprised with how well it tasted since it wasn't from an established brand, but I guess you can't really go wrong with tofu sauce. Either way, it was a good buy and I regret not buying more back now. At least we know for the next time we visit Korea!
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
Check out my previous post in this series!
