Quote:
Originally Posted by tiniree
If there a way to get the nutrients that tofu has without eating it?
Marie
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you may like edamame (steamed soy beans - they taste like a cross between peanuts and lima beans).
You may also like "good" tofu. We're super lucky to live in an area in which homemade tofu is available. Tofu absorbs the flavor of whatever it's touching - which means that most commercial tofu tastes like plastic or waxed paper.
But good tofu, and good tofu recipes aren't easy to find. I'm really lucky that my husband worked for years in a four star chinese restaurant.
I actually had no idea he was the "magic tofu chef" until we had vegetarian dinner guests, and my husband made this tofu dish that was amazing. His secret was pressing the water out of the tofu (the day before the dinner, he sandwhiched the tofu between two glass plates set in a large baking dish) and set a heavy weight on the top plate. Then when he cooked the tofu, he cut it into strips, and flash-stir-fried it in peanut oil with garlic, sherry, soy and other seasonings.
WOW, what a difference. The tofu had more of a "meaty" texture than a soft-cheesy texture. And because we'd gotten fresh-made tofu, it had only been in the plastic container a few hours, so it didn't taste like plastic.
Someone here said that freezing tofu and then pressing the water out after it's thawed, removes even more moisture.
Another possibility is tvp (textured vegetable protein). We use the unflavored granules, which is a dehydrated a ground-meat substitute. You add equal parts of hot water or broth to reconstitute. It looks like Grape Nuts cereal or beige gravel. Like tofu, it has almost no flavor of it's own, so you really have to season it up. Hubby can't stand it unless it's been cooked with meat, so I use it to "stretch" ground meats. I'll brown ground meat (any or a mixture of beef, pork, chicken, turkey, chorizo, italian sausage) with seasoning veggies like onion, celery, bell pepper, mushroom, garlic with the dry tvp. I wait to add the liquid until after browning, because I think the tvp picks up more of the meat flavor. But when the ground meat is no longer pink I'll add the hot water or broth (about equal in volume to the tvp I used). 1 cup of dry tvp is equal to about a pound of meat.
I try to buy tvp in health food stores that sell it in bulk, because it's usually cheaper, but we don't have a local health store that sells in bulk anymore, so I either buy it in 12 ounce packages from Walmart (in the health food isle) or I stock up when I visit my sister in Illinois (or she brings some up when she visits).
You can also eat it as a hot breakfast cereal. I add a tablespoon or two of tvp to instant oatmeal packets to dilute the sweetness (I buy unflavored, unsweetened instant oatmeal when I can find it).
There are some health concerns with over-eating soy-based foods (plant-estrogens are the main issue, I believe and the problems only arise with unusually high consumption of soy. For example the people studied were eating multiple servings of soy daily).
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