Ozumo Brings the Art of Tofu Making to the Table

The chefs who order our soy products continue to inspire us with their innovation in not only recipe development, but cuisine experiences. While visiting San Francisco's Ozumo last Friday, we observed the magic of tofu formation brought to our table!

Upon request, servers entertain guests with a tofu-making demonstration. "I've always wanted to do table-side tofu," Chef Alex Morgan says. After touring our beanery last month, he asked for a lesson in silken tofu making. He brought his knowledge back to Ozumo and taught all his servers his newfound skill. The freshly made tofu is served with pickled watermelon radish, pickled ginger, wasabi, and dashi.

Located in San Francisco's SOMA neighborhood at 161 Steuart Street, Ozumo is a stylish restaurant know for its innovative contemporary Japanese cuisine. The beautifully presented small plates, sushi rolls, robata grill and North America's most extensive sake menu bring in a crowd every night for happy hour and dinner. While Ozumo's signature dishes are hanabi, dohyo, futago, and gindara, the chefs are the most proud of serving tontoro. Tontoro is a pork jowel slowly braised in sweet tentsuyu for four hours. So tender, tontoro falls to pieces on your tongue.

We were delighted to discover Hodo's silken tofu, yuba and nama yuba incorporated into equally delicate dishes. Yuba is a subtle, protein-packed delicacy made by skimming off the elegant layer of skin that forms on the surface of heated soy milk. Nama yuba is the youngest yuba, a creamier soft-cheese-textured soy milk skin, with a sweet and nutty flavor. We recommend pairing nama yuba dishes with nama sake, which is raw and unpasteurized and exhibits more rice flavor.

Our first course was the Yuba Maki, an upscale shinjo version of the Philly Roll. Salmon, spinach and gindara were wrapped in yuba, fried, and served on top of a lobster aka miso sauce. "I don't think cheese and seafood should be served together," Alex remarked, pointing out the nama yuba taking the place of cream cheese. It did the trick, providing the creaminess and richness that compliments salmon so well.

We next enjoyed blanched artichoke hearts from the Yasai menu. They were served on top of a rich nama yuba sauce, mixed with sour cream and garlic. The white sauce swirled into a soy sauce, making a beautiful ying and yang design below the criss-crossed hearts, and complimenting each other's flavors beautifully.

Alex's most stand-out dish was the Chowan Dofu soup. Chowan Dofu is a vegan take on chowan muchi, an egg custard soup made with dashi and eggs. This housemade black trumpet mushroom broth with heart of palm and rice flour was adorned with a beautiful tower of fresh vegetables, floating on an island of silken tofu. Minh smiled approvingly at the first bite: "This is a vegan delight. The meaty mushrooms are a perfect smokey balance to the creamy silk." Its heartiness was the perfect remedy after a week of unexpected late-spring rain. The richness rivaled a French Onion soup, and we felt warmed and full before finishing our bowls.

For those Hodo fans who haven't had the chance to tour our beanery and taste our tofu seconds after its born, Ozumo now provides another location for this experience! Just order table-side tofu as a course from Omakase, the chef tasting menu. And, unlike at our beanery, at Ozumo, you can pair your tofu with sakes and wines!

Hodo Near You

We are excited to report that more and more Bay Area grocery stores have started to carry Hodo products! Take a look at the updated Stores page on our website.

You will still have to hit the farmers' market to find our whole line of products, but most stores carry a selection of our ready-to-cook products (such as tofu blocks or yuba) and ready-to-eat products (such as our Edamame Tofu Salad and Spicy Yuba Strips).

More info to come on the stores themselves - these are some great places to shop!

Who's Your Tofu Master?

Hodo's 2010 t-shirt is now available! Show your love for your favorite tofu company. "Who's Your Tofu Master?" on the front, our logo on the back. Printed on American Apparel unisex tees.

$18 at all of Hodo farmers' market stands or when you come for a tour of The Beanery!

The Beanier, the Better

Each production day at The Beanery, the tofu making team shows up for work in the morning and starts making fresh soymilk. Hodo's soymilk is the basis of everything that we do, including both tofu and yuba. One of the things that we have learned through the years is that the better the soymilk, the better the tofu and yuba.

People often ask why our soymilk tastes so different from what they commonly find at the supermarket. Simply put, it is because we love the natural flavor of the soybean.

Hodo's soymilk is made the traditional Asian way: soybeans are soaked in water, ground, cooked, and the liquid (or soymilk) is strained from the bean pulp. That's it. Nothing else is added. The result is a wonderfully fresh, sweet taste that is, well, "beany". In contrast, most of the soymilk in American supermarkets has been made to taste more like cow's milk. The bean flavor has been neutralized and flavorings are added.

At Hodo, the beanier, the better. Because when we use this soymilk to make our tofu and yuba, the fresh flavor of the bean is one of the reasons that they taste so good.

During production, one of the ways that we guarantee that our products have all of the flavor that we want is by measuring the Brix of our soymilk. The Brix scale measures the percent of solids in a given weight of liquid. The higher the number, the more solids in that liquid. As applied to soymilk, the higher the number, the greater density of soybean in the milk and, therefore, the more natural flavor. Hodo tofu makers love high Brix.

These are photos of our head soymilk maker, Ray Chang, first checking a batch of soymilk and then measuring the Brix with a refractometer. Interestingly, this same device has been used for years in the winemaking industry. Winemakers use the Brix scale to measure the quality of the grapes on the vine and the juice before bottling. We have adapted this same concept; we know that the flavor of our chief ingredient (in our case, soybeans) determines the flavor of what we produce.

Some Recent Beanery Press

Thanks to Patricia Yollin (SF Chronicle) and Katie Robbins (The Atlantic) for the nice articles on Hodo and The Beanery this week!

And to Mike Kepka for catching Minh in yuba-making rapture here.

On the Menu

A few years ago, chefs started to include on their menus the names of the producers of some of their key ingredients (e.g. "Star Route Farms baby gem lettuce" or "Marin Sun Farms rib eye"). This helps restaurants to convey the quality, freshness and often local origin of the ingredients that they choose to use. Customers also like being able to appreciate the source and uniqueness of the dish.

Hodo has always been very thankful to the chefs who have put the Hodo name on the restaurant menus. We are proud of the fact that we are the first tofu company to achieve this "menu mention" status (see snapshot of the menu at The Slanted Door). The Hodo name is on the menu of restaurants of all types: everything from Asian to French, white table cloth to casual, and vegetarian to omnivore.

We have decided to highlight some of the restaurants and the dishes that they make from our products. We continue to be inspired by these innovative and delicious creations. So, in the posts ahead, we will occasionally write up a profile of some of these chefs, their restaurants, and their dishes using Hodo Soy Beanery products.

Stay tuned . . .

What is a Beanery?

With word spreading that we are now producing out of the new Beanery in Oakland, many have been asking us a basic question - what is a "Beanery"?

The idea of The Beanery came about when we first created Hodo. We liked the idea of a singular place dedicated to making a special food or beverage - like a creamery, patisserie, bakery, or brewery. So, The Beanery is simply the place where we make delicious things out of soybeans.

There are other beaneries out there - just not "soy beaneries" like Hodo. I have seen beaneries that deal in coffee beans. I have also found casual restaurants calling themselves beaneries. Actually, in late-19th, early-20th century US, a beanery was a simple restaurant where you were more likely to see baked beans on the menu than a cut of meat.

We spent a long time looking for the right location to build Hodo Soy Beanery. In the end, we loved the heritage of our building in West Oakland. Ever since it was first built in the 1920s, it has continuously been in food production. For 70 years, it was a candy factory - you can still see the sugar silos in the back of the building. Then, in the '90s, it became a bakery - our core tofu production equipment sits where the ovens used to be. We love being a part of this history and working in a building that has been producing food all of its life.

Tofu Making... a Spiritual Experience?

There's something really satisfying about making tofu. It's so rare to make anything from scratch these days and it's very labor intensive, but I always feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment after a production day at our brand new facility.

It's almost magical how we transform organic soybeans and purified water into steaming cups of soymilk, tender blocks of tofu, and billowing sheets of yuba using a technique created thousands of years ago.

While there are very few ingredients involved in tofu-making, there is a tremendous amount of labor, care, and practice that is required, similar to cheese-making or bread-making. And like those artisan practices, tofu-making can be a source of deep satisfaction that satiates not only a physical hunger, but a spiritual one too.

The Humble Soybean

Did you know that the usable protein in a 1/2 cup of soybeans is the same as that contained in 5 ounces of steak? An 8 ounce serving of tofu has 11.5 gms of usable protein, the equivalent of 3.25 ounces of steak, 5.5 oz of hamburger, or 2 eggs (THE BOOK OF TOFU, William Shurtleff). Plus its got no cholesterol or saturated fat.

These are pretty stunning facts, not to mention that soybeans produce 33% more protein per acre of land than any other crop, and 20 times more usable protein as could be raised on an acre of land given over to grazing beef.

While the health and environmental benefits of consuming more protein from soybeans are compelling, I eat tofu mostly because it tastes great when made fresh and prepared with care.

In the case of tofu, I can satisfy my belly and my conscience....

Yuba Yuba Doo!

Yuba, or "tofu skin" is my wife's favorite thing to eat right now. She loves sushi, tartare, oysters on the half shell, and pretty much anything raw. The silky, tender, sheets of yuba have a consistency and mouthfeel that is both delicate and creamy at the same time, and not unlike some of these delicacies.

My wife loves yuba because it reminds her of something luxurious like beef tartare or uni (sea urchin) without the guilt (cholesterol, fat, etc.) and she begs me to bring home freshly made yuba all the time. Once I pluck the tender sheets of "sashimi" from steaming trays of freshly made soymilk, I immediately immerse them in glass jars and top them off with some soymilk to keep them moist.

While I'm still working, I already day dream about how we will prepare the yuba. Our favorite way is to chill and serve it with a simple sauce. Dashi sauce with bit of fresh wasabi is awesome. So is dashi with some sliced jalapenos and a touch of sesami oil. We use the sauce sparingly and only dip the yuba so we don't overwhelm its natural sweetness.

After finishing tofu making for the day, I clutch the precious jar of "tofu sashimi" and trek home, thinking about how pleased my wife will be- and maybe, I can swap the contents of this jar for her commitment to take out the trash this week..