Happy Tofu To You!
Anna recommends Stockholm spots where people, place or produce are important, and guest writer Joe Rogers shares a recipe created by community - Ma Po Tofu of dreams!
Recently my (Anna) friend Joe posted on instagram a photo of Ma Po Tofu and I needed it in my life! I’ve been cooking spiced (with Diaspora Co spices!) broths and comfort even though it’s summer, and this fitted my mood. What I loved was how Joe’s recipe was a collaboration that the space of Peckham, his neighbourhood, provided. But before we get on to comfort cooking, I wanted to highlight some amazing food and drinks I had in Stockholm…
What Anna Ate and Drank
I recently went to Stockholm, it was for a press trip and sponsored by Visit Stockholm, but the other three journalists were food and drinks specialists… Needless to say, my belly stayed very full the whole time. I am a big fan of Sweden, and Stockholm didn’t disappoint.
As always, it's the way people, the place and the produce interconnect that I find really interesting and these spots really focused on those relationships in different ways.
This one Michelin starred restaurant has become a bit of an institution. It's a really beautiful restaurant and everything is based around the fire. As you move through the restaurant from snacks and drinks in the bar, and then squeeze around the hearth and are fed dishes hot of flames - this is where I think the best food came from! There was a lot of simplicity in the food, so that the ingredient shined. In Niklas Ekstedt’s book he writes about working with Sami ingredients - the indigenous peoples of Scandinavia’s North Pole - and I interested to know more about that.
Had a mini tasting in an outside bar, in the middle of a park. Highly recommend it! From a love of natural wine, the two founders created Brutes Cider - using Sweden’s natural resources of a lot of fruits, particularly apples! They source from what were largely forgotten, but not abandoned, orchards. It does drink like wine, definitely something to have food. Fun flavours.
I don’t even know where to start with this bakery. Firstly the baker/owner Alfred Hellstrom is really young! He started baking on his family’s farm in northern Sweden, it took off, so he opened a bakery in Stockholm (this is the really short version). A bakery born from a farm community, working with local ingredients and growing into a city establishment. I want to write a proper story about him, and particularly his family’s farm in the north and the cheese they make. They make their cinnamon buns with mostly cinnamon, as opposed to cassia which is more traditional for Swedish pastries. It's a lovely spot - go!
This is a very popular gelato spot! Owner Hosanna Amanuel is an acclaimed baker and pastry chef, she creates a beautiful array of flavours - some really classic combos, but also ones that pull on her heritage and the city of Stockholm. In winter she makes chocolate!
I think this was the highlight. A traditional Swedish cuisine, in the heart of the old city, but it was a dynamic restaurant and lacked the cliches of tradtion. Herring is a historic food of the Swedes, but fishing it has become problematic due to industrial fishing. Sillkafeet are trying to explore this, and find ways of retaining the heritage, bringing fresh perspectives to the food, and investigating sourcing. I ate a lot of herring, it was incredibly delicious. Drank a fair bit of schnapps too! There is a lot of pepper in the herring dishes - which of course I found interesting.
This is a small brewery that is highly creative - they are interested in playing with flavour, but not in an overworked way that can happen with beer. They react really seasonally - it's super fun, and really delicious. I had a cucumber beer, which was so refreshing. And, a popular beer is called Peppar Peppar - it’s got a whole lot of spice!
If I do another show or research adventure on pepper, I would go to Stockholm - they love it! In the herring dishes, in their beer… Go stop in at the Pepper Quest and find a whole bunch of pepper and pepper adjacent spice.
Joe’s Ma Po Tofu
Joe is a food, drinks, and restaurant writer - you can find him here - and good friend of mine. When I saw him posting his Ma Po Tofu, it looked so good I immediately did that annoying thing of ‘recipe!?”. And then, he actually wrote it all down and sent it to me! Which is very kind.
Joe says “I want to make it clear that this is a total mish mash, I interpolated it from other recipes, from eating ma po tofu, from imagining it as something that maybe it wasn’t principally dissimilar from other things I’d cooked and just going with it, from chatting with the people at my local Chinese supermarket. This lad at my local butcher helped me a lot with this recipe.”
Therefore, I have copied and pasted exactly what he sent me. I love the way he writes recipes - it’s such a lovely read just as a piece of prose. (ps. as we usually do vegetarian recipes, aubergine works well instead of mince)
Ingredients
The basics:
· Firm tofu
· The absolute best pork mince you can get – however much tofu you have, use about half its drained weight in pork mince, maybe slightly more.
· Ginger (plenty)
· Garlic (same)
· Spring onions (whites to fry with, greens for garnish)
· Dry sherry
· Aged beef suet or other dry-aged beef fat
· Chicken or veal stock
· Doubanjiang
· Soy sauce
· Corn flour
· Dried chilis (heaven facing pepper is good, but use what you have)
· Red Szechuan peppercorns
· Green Szechuan peppercorns
· Black peppercorns
Flavour stuff:
This is where you can throw in whatever you feel like but these are the sorts of flavour bits I tend to use. I’m going for big umami and ma la with a little balancing sweetness. The vinegar is just to slightly cut all that fat and richness, not to make it acidic as such.
· Fish sauce
· Mushroom powder
· Brown sugar
· Chilli crisp with black beans
· Sherry vinegar (Humanity’s most perfect vinegar)
· Tomato puree
· Gochugaru
Pepper Blend
It’s down to your tastes how much you include, of course: but I’d say use lots and go for a ratio of 2:1 red-to-green peppercorns with 6-12 dried chilis and a scant handful of black peppercorns in there for good measure. You’re the queen of pepper, so you’ll probably introduce some other exciting varieties here, but the principle remains the same.
Toast everything in a dry wok and remove to a spare plate. Grind about 1/3 of your peppercorns in a pestle and mortar if you have all day and an electric grinder if you don’t. Pass through a fine sieve to take out any big bits of husk and reserve.
Spicy Oil
Roughly dice your beef suet and throw it in the wok over a low-ish heat. The goal here is to render out all the fat so you can infuse it with your toasted peppercorns. You could use vegetable oil, but the aged beef fat is infinitely tastier and better for you (probably). If I give my butcher a few days’ notice he can normally hook me up.
Once you’re happy with the rendering, remove the pieces of suet with a slotted spoon, throw them on your cutting board and dice them up small. The whole toasted peppercorns and chilis go into the wok with the rendered beef fat over a medium heat to infuse. If you want to go for mega spicy, this is where I’d throw in a handful of crushed hot chilis. You’ll know this, of course, but the peppercorns can catch easily – when the pan is sizzly and smells of grapefruit, I take it off the heat and let it sit for another five minutes or so. Pass the oil through a sieve to take out the whole peppercorns and chilis and reserve your spicy, numbing oil.
These first stages are a bit of a faff, but they give you a good foundation to build the dish on. I’ll generally do this and get en place with all my other ingredients before whoever I’m eating with arrives.
The Actual Cooking
Dice up your tofu – not too small – and give it a blanch in salted boiling water. Leave to steam in a nice big colander, spreading it all out into a single layer for maximum surface area, if possible.
Pour some of your spicy oil into the wok and cook the pork mince over medium-high heat till you get some nice caramelised bits. Shouts goes out to Mr Maillard – big fan of your reaction, sir.
Throw in your ginger, garlic, spring onion whites, and rendered beef suet and fry till everything stops looking raw. Then add your dry seasonings: about half of your ground pepper blend, gochugaru, and mushroom powder. Fry until you’re happy with how it smells. Add two-ish tablespoons of your black bean chili crisp.
Next we need a couple of good tablespoons of doubanjiang and a smaller one of tomato puree – we’re not going for tomato-y flavour, just that good sweetness and umami. Cook until the chili bean paste is nicely coloured.
Then add your sherry, followed by your stock, and give everything a good simmer. At this point I’d recommend a little sherry break and a moment to give yourself a high five because you’re doing great.
Start tasting and seasoning up with fish sauce and soy sauce, I tend to go quite light with the soy and lean a bit more on the fish sauce for a brighter profile overall. Gently fold in the tofu and start adjusting sweetness and acidity with the brown sugar and sherry vinegar.
Once the sauce is to your liking, whisk a light tablespoon of corn starch and a splash of warm water in a bowl and pour into the wok to thicken.
Transfer to a serving bowl if you’re fancy or just serve straight from the wok. Garnish with spring onion greens, reserved pepper powder, and a drizzle of the remaining spicy oil. Serve with white rice, smacked cucumbers, and maybe some greens for luxury. Your colder climate off-dry white wines are obviously nice here, but I really do like this with a few cans of very cold bang average lager.
Variations
When it comes to your umami stuff, I reckon you can use whatever you have to hand. Infusing your sherry/stock with some nice dried mushrooms and dicing them to throw in the wok would probably be nice.
I’ve swapped out the pork mince for lamb or venison in the past and had great results. I find 100% beef mince a bit heavy, but I’m sure it can be made to work. I think there’s fun to be had introducing some offal into the mix to get deeper flavour in your sauce, but I haven’t gone down that route yet. Some chicken livers would be a natural choice as would some bone marrow. Finely chopped lamb’s hearts would also probably be excellent.
I’m planning to try a version where I slow cook the sauce ahead of time like a ragu – which makes sense in terms of minimising time in the kitchen when you’ve got guests and probably makes for a nice consistency. If you try this before me, let me know how it goes.
Happy tofu to you, Jx
READING LIST
Don’t forget to check out our latest MILK season piece - a poem and illustration ‘Pure Milk’
Our Bookshop.org page has recommendations of books, which have featured in past seasons, and any purchase through there helps us and independent bookshops!
As if I didn't already have Sweden on my want to visit list, this would have made me want to go! Every food show I've watched where someone visits the Nordics intrigues me so much, and I'm dying to do a trip and make up my own mind once and for all - it seems so possible to really "eat from the land" there but I wonder whether that's just what I glean from TV, and how accessible that actually is to people in everyday life there. Most likely, it's like any country - if you seek out the sort of food you're after, you'll find it, but it might not always be the most prominent thing, if that makes sense