Making tofu in the mountains of Nagano

An excerpt from Gohan: Everyday Japanese Cooking

My grandparents, living in an area with many Buddhist temples, were spoiled for choice when it came to fresh tofu shops on their street. I remember those old fashioned shops – just a room of spartan, concrete floors and stainless steel vats of water holding the morning's just-made tofu, and the a smiling old woman selling them. Fast disappearing now, I travelled to Chino, a two hour train ride from Tokyo, to the foothills of Nagano's mountain ranges, to learn how to make fresh tofu with Kobayashi-san, who makes tofu for all the local schools and sells the rest through his tiny shop.

He's about to turn seventy years old but you wouldn't guess from his spritely energy as he runs from one part of his laboratory to the other gathering the equipment to show me how to make a batch of tofu. It's only 10am but his day actually began at 3am to make tofu for the schools.

He starts with soybeans – these have been soaked for 20 hours and they are plump and shiny and piled high in the top of a contraption that both purees and cooks them in just minutes. It's a bit like a giant pressure cooker. Fresh spring water from the mountains is added to this as the soybeans get sucked into the machine – I ask him whether the mountain water is something that makes this tofu special and he nods, it is full of natural minerals. But also, Kobayashi-san points out, the weather, the season and altitude affects the whole process too. The way he makes tofu is particular to this area.

Next, the bean pulp is separated from the liquid, pouring out fresh, boiling hot soy milk into a large bucket and okara, the dry, crumbly soybean pulp, into another. The okara is a delicious side product and used for stirring through salads and side dishes – it is excellent at soaking up good flavours. He adds a saucepan full of cool spring water to the soy milk to cool it down.

“The most important thing about making tofu is the temperature of the soy milk when you put the nigari in,” he tells me.

Nigari is bittern, the leftover salts from evaporating salt water. My mind is racing wondering how the first person discovered that these salts – mostly magnesium, calcium and potassium – could coagulate soy milk and turn it into tofu.

“Too hot and it becomes very hard, too cool and it won't set.”

The ideal temperature is somewhere between 75ºC and 80ºC. It seems such a modern, chemistry driven process that it is amazes me how barely unchanged tofu making is from its ancient methods – quite like cheesemaking.

Kobayashi-san checks the temperature again. He prepares his nigari solution, dissolving the salts into some water in a jug. It is a tiny amount compared to the huge bucket of steaming soy milk. He pours it in then very gently and very briefly, he swirls a stick – it's called a kai – through the bucket to distribute the nigari.

“It's like a sensor,” says Kobayashi-san, since you can feel through the kai how dense the tofu is becoming.

Now we wait a moment. I can already see the soy milk begin to separate and lump up. Having made cheese many times, I can't help but see the parallels, and it just becomes more and more similar. As we wait, chunky, soft clouds of curd float towards the surface.

“Oboro,” Kobayashi-san explains, “They're like baby tofu.”

Then he scoops some out into dishes and hands me one. It's so creamy, like the very best, wobbly, melt in the mouth cream caramel, and it takes me right to central Sicily where just a few weeks earlier, I had tasted the first fresh curds of a pecorino just as the shepherd had swirled rennet through the hot sheep's milk.

He mixes the soy milk again, but gently, so as not to break up the other “baby tofus” underneath, which helps give a soft, fluffy texture to the final tofu. He is also looking for the soy milk to change colour from creamy opaque to slightly transparent – this is called yu. It looks exactly like curds and whey and if you only saw a photograph of it you would be forgiven for thinking we were making cheese.

He scoops this out and pours the curds into a prepared “bed” for the tofu, a holed tray covered with a fine cheesecloth, which then gets pressed, first by Kobayashi-san himself and then with the machine, where a plank of wood is pushed down over the top of the bed of curds, squeezing out the excess yu. Moments later, it gets turned out on a floating board in a huge vat of fresh spring water and sliced.

In a matter of half an hour the first batch of tofu is done.

We sat down to taste it — my favourite part. First, I was told, I must taste it on its own. Then the next bite should be with a pinch of salt and some egoma oil – perilla seed oil, which the villagers grow themselves in community fields with laborious harvests. It is a highly prized, very fragrant oil, a little similar to sesame oil but more herby than nutty, that has been long appreciated in East Asian countries for its medicinal properties as much as for its use in the kitchen. It might be my favourite new flavour discovery.

Finally, try it with soy sauce. And that bite tasted like my Obaachan's breakfast.

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It’s publication week! My 6th cookbook, Gohan: Everyday Japanese Cooking is finally out in the world and I am feeling ALL of the feelings!

If you have a copy, I hope you’re enjoying it and if you feel you’re able to leave a review for it on Amazon or similar, I really appreciate it.

For the full recipe for homemade tofu from Gohan, I’ve just shared it here on my blog.

If you are interested in doing an experience like this in Japan, I did this by contacting the local tourism office of Chino, Chino Tabi — we did this tofu making class and a cooking class with a local Obachan (grandmother) through them, as well as organise our stay in this incredible 200 year old Japanese farmhouse. You can also arrange to have a translator there too if you need it. And I wrote more about this stay in Nagano for my subscribers here, in case you missed it earlier. A dream stay, I can’t wait to go back one day with my whole family.