Basic crispy tofu

This is the diagnostic recipe. Four ingredients, no sauce to cover anything up, and a finished piece you eat plain to find out whether your pressing, your pan and your heat are actually working.

If a piece tastes good on its own, every recipe on this site will work for you. If it does not, the problem is in this method rather than in whatever sauce you were planning, and you have found that out after fifteen minutes instead of after buying ingredients for something more elaborate.

It is also genuinely useful food. A batch in the refrigerator turns any bowl, salad or plate of noodles into a meal with protein in it.

Ingredients

• 1 block (14 to 16 oz) extra-firm tofu, pressed 20 to 30 minutes
• 1 tablespoon cornstarch, arrowroot or potato starch
• 3/4 teaspoon fine salt, divided
• 2 to 3 tablespoons neutral oil with a high smoke point

Vegetable, canola, grapeseed, avocado or refined peanut oil all work. Extra virgin olive oil and toasted sesame oil both burn at this temperature and turn bitter, so neither belongs in the pan.

Method

1. Press. Twenty to thirty minutes under a heavy pan or in a press, until the block feels dense and springy and the surface reads matte rather than wet. The pressing guide covers four ways to do this, including a fifteen minute version.
2. Cut and dry. Even three quarter inch cubes. Pat every cut face dry, because tofu keeps releasing water after cutting and those faces are the ones that need to be dry.
3. Coat. Toss with the starch and half a teaspoon of salt until the pieces look dusty rather than pasty. Starch goes on after drying and before any oil. Onto wet tofu it turns to glue.
4. Heat the pan. Preheat a twelve inch cast iron or carbon steel pan over medium-high, then add the oil and wait for it to shimmer and move easily when you tilt the pan. A test cube should sizzle steadily the moment it lands.
5. Fry undisturbed. Single layer, visible gaps, two batches if one will not fit. Then leave it alone for 3 to 4 minutes. Tofu sticks first and releases itself once a crust forms, so a piece that will not lift is telling you to wait.
6. Turn and finish. Turn the pieces and keep going until most faces are golden and firm. Ten to twelve minutes total. You do not need all six faces browned, and chasing that overcooks the middle.
7. Salt hot. Onto a plate, then the last quarter teaspoon of salt straight away while the surface can still hold it. Eat a piece plain before you decide it needs anything.

What a good piece is like

The outside should be firm enough to make a faint sound when you bite it, and the inside should still be tender rather than dry or hollow. It should taste of salt and of frying, faintly nutty, and it should not taste of water.

If the outside is hard the whole way through, the pieces were too small or the heat was too low for too long. If there is no crust at all, the block was not pressed enough or the pan was crowded. The diagnostic list works through the other nine possibilities.

Where to take it from here

Once this works, everything else is a sauce added off the heat in the final minute. Chili garlic, ginger soy, peanut and buffalo all start from exactly this batch.

Or skip the sauce. Salt and a squeeze of lemon on hot crispy tofu is a legitimate way to eat it, and it is the version that most reliably surprises people who thought they had already made up their minds.

Storing

Three to four days in the refrigerator. Cool it fully before it goes into a container, because sealing it warm produces condensation that softens the crust overnight.

Reheat in a hot dry pan for two minutes, in an air fryer at 375F for four, or in a 400F oven for six to eight. It is also good cold straight from the container, which is not true of most cooked proteins and is a large part of why a standing batch is worth having.