Although I’m not at all a vegetarian, my Instagram Explore feed is quite aspirational and so it likes to send me vegan/vegetarian recipes from time to time. Enter tofu pasta - I was quite intrigued by the idea of making pasta from a mixture of tofu and plain flour.
You can watch this reel to see what I mean, but basically you blend up a block of silken tofu, and then mix it together with flour until it turns into a ball of dough. Then you use scissors to chop off bits of the ball to create little weirdly-shaped pieces of pasta.
I’m not sure if there’s any additional nutritional benefits to making pasta like this (maybe more protein? and it’s vegan?) but it seemed simple enough so I decided to give it a go. It helped that we already had gochujang paste on hand, and that tofu is so widely available here in Japan (and cheap, too).
And my verdict - it’s not bad! I would eat this again. The noodles can be a bit chewy so I would cut them smaller if you can. I think the main highlight of this dish is it also makes for a pretty creamy pasta thanks to the tofu, which is probably hard to replicate without dairy.
It was a bit spicy-yet-bland so we also added in some tomato sauce. And I really like chickpeas so I added in a can of that as well for good measure. I think next time I will try mixing in real cherry tomatoes as well for some extra flavour.
And a side note on the gochujang paste - it’s a Korean paste, so it’s not quite common enough that every Japanese supermarket is going to stock it. You may have to try a place or two to find it in stock but I don’t think it should be that hard to find.
Below is taken straight from the Instagram reel, but as a note to self -
Ingredients
- 300g silken tofu (絹ごし豆腐) blended
- 120g plain flour (薄力粉)
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 2 cloves garlic diced
- 1 small diced onion
- 2 tspn gochujang
- 1 can chickpeas
- Tomato sauce (or maybe real tomatoes)
- 1 tspn salt
Instructions
- Blend block of tofu in a blender.
- Add plain flour, start mixing in tofu paste until it becomes doughy. Add in more flour if you fuck up and add too much of the tofu (lol).
- Knead until becomes a ball of dough. Use scissors to cut off small strips.
- Boil strips in water - scoop them out as they float to the top
- In pan, add olive oil, onion, garlic until they soften
- Add gochujang and mix all together.
- Add remaining blended tofu in, plus a bit of pasta water to make the sauce.
- Toss pasta and chickpeas in with the sauce
- Taste test - add salt and tomato sauce. I want to try cherry tomatoes next time.
- Garnish with parsley to make it look less like a bloring blob of orange.
Leave a comment