Recipes that convert skeptics
Twelve recipes ordered by how hard they are to get wrong. Every one assumes you do not currently like tofu and is built to change that on the first try.
How to pick one
If you have never cooked tofu successfully, start with the basic crispy method and eat it plain. It takes fifteen minutes and it tells you whether your pan, your heat and your pressing are working before you spend money on ingredients for a sauce.
If you are cooking for someone who says they hate tofu, use chili garlic or buffalo. Both lead with a flavor people already like and let the tofu be a texture rather than the point of the dish.
If you are cooking on Sunday for the week ahead, smoky paprika and barbecue both hold up cold and reheat without going rubbery.
Every recipe assumes you have read the four fixes. Pressing in particular is written as one line in the ingredient list and is doing a lot of quiet work.
Start here
Basic crispy tofu, the blank canvas
Pressed, starched, pan-fried, salted. No sauce, no marinade, nothing to hide behind. Learn this and every other recipe becomes a decision about what to pour over it.
Ginger soy glazed tofu
Six main ingredients and one pan. The glaze thickens in the final minute, which is the most forgiving way to sauce tofu because nothing has time to go soggy.
The convincers
These are the ones to cook when someone at the table has already announced they do not like tofu.
Extra-crispy chili garlic tofu
Cornstarch crust, garlic bloomed in oil, sticky chili sauce added off the heat so the crunch survives. This recipe has the highest conversion rate of anything here.
Buffalo tofu bites
Hot sauce and butter over crisp cubes. It occupies the same place at the table as wings and gets judged by the same standard, which it can meet.
General Tso's tofu
Sweet, sour, garlicky and aggressive. The sauce is thick enough to cling without soaking through, provided the crust is dry when it goes in.
Crispy tofu katsu
Panko-crusted slabs, shallow fried, sliced and served with katsu sauce. The crunchiest thing on this site and the least tofu-like in the mouth.
Weeknight and meal prep
Smoky paprika tofu
A spice paste rather than a wet marinade, which means it sticks to the surface instead of running off. Excellent cold in bowls and wraps for three days.
Barbecue tofu
Best with frozen and thawed tofu, because barbecue sauce is thick and needs somewhere to go. Oven or grill, both work.
Peanut sauce tofu
Rich, salty, faintly sweet. Peanut sauce does most of the persuading, and the recipe scales to whatever vegetables are in the fridge.
Tofu scramble
Breakfast tofu with turmeric, kala namak and enough heat to drive off moisture. The version most people have tried was underseasoned and undercooked.
Cooking for children
Tofu for kids: shapes and formats that actually get eaten
Shape does more work than seasoning with young children. Nuggets, fries, craggy torn chunks, tiny cubes in soup, and the blended route into puddings. Most of it is faster than the recipes above and none of it requires a child to have opinions about tofu.
The one that is not fried at all
Tofu pesto sauce from a freezer cube
Blended silken tofu and one frozen cube of pesto make a creamy high-protein sauce in about three minutes. It uses the opposite half of the tofu shelf from everything else here, needs no pressing, no pan and no crust, and the cube-tray trick behind it works with any flavor base you want to keep on hand.
Things that apply to all ten
Buy extra-firm or super-firm unless a recipe says otherwise. Press unless the tofu came vacuum packed and already dry. Cut into pieces large enough to survive tossing, which usually means three quarter inch cubes or half inch slabs rather than anything smaller.
Use more oil than you think and a pan wider than you think. Crowding is the single most common reason a recipe that worked for someone else fails for you. Two batches in a medium pan beat one batch in a full one every time.
Add thick sauces near the end, off high heat, and toss for under a minute. Sauce added early turns the crust back into a wet surface.
Taste a piece before you sauce it. If the plain tofu tastes flat at that point, no sauce is going to rescue the dish, and the fix is more salt in the starch rather than more sauce at the end.
Salt at the end as well as the beginning. A finishing pinch on hot tofu does something a marinade cannot.
If any of that is unfamiliar, the crisping guide explains the reasoning, and the gear section covers the pans and pantry items that make it easier.