Soy Simplified

It was a good idea, honestly! What better way to use okara than to lean on the popular uses I’d read about? The problem came in when I tried to apply what I’d read in an ill-conceived fashion. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t horrible it just ranked among those meals people refer to as weird hippie food if ya know what I mean. And the thing is, the meal wasn’t nutritionally a powerhouse, we had multiple fried dishes and it was really supposed to appeal to the junk food lover. Ah well.

The menu as planned consisted of the following: junk food tofu, croquettes, a stir fry with okara, shrimp egg foo yung (for familiarity and to appease those who might ask, “where’s the meat?”) and rice.

Things really started to come apart when my son anounced, just as I was going to get it from the cupboard that the nutritional yeast had been used up on popcorn that day. It might not seem important but it’s key to the tofu being the way I wanted it to be and I use it in egg foo yung gravy. Bah! The tofu ended up fried with soy sizzled on it, not bad but not as welcomed by the family as what we lovingly refer to as “junk food tofu”.

I followed a recipe for croquettes, the recipe didn’t mention chilling and that’s probably what did us in. We didn’t have time for chilling when it came down to it and the thought only occured to me after the damage had been done. Instead we thickened with flour so the end result wasn’t a creamy croquette but a lightly moist fried ball. I see potential in the okara croquette though and will try them again only remembering to chill the batter. I should add that even imperfect they were well received by most of the family, only the husband disliked them in any kind of extreme way.

The stir fry…should probably be an embarrassment and yet it was again, not bad! Just strange. I would have (should have) made a soup but since the husband doesn’t like soups I avoided it. I had read that it could be used to “lighten” vegetables (who knows what that really means eh?) Going totally off the cuff I tossed the okara in the wok, added water and some seasonings. One of the issues I see mentioned on occasion is the need to cook the okara before eating it, the processing in the making of milk doesn’t cook it enough to make it nicely digestible. I wanted to keep that in mind. So I figured adding water and cooking it in the wok would serve that purpose and it did! But but the seasonings should have been added later (oyster sauce in particular) because there was an issue with burning near the end. Things to keep in mind when experimenting in the future. I removed the cooked seasoned stuff and cooked veggies, onions, spinach, fresh ginger, water chestnuts and then re-added the okara and mixed it well. There was too much okara. It was really tasty, the okara was tasty but it was not something familiar to people. It’s hard to descrsibe really because, again, it was kind of good, just somehow, not right.

The okara was used up and I learned a few things with this meal.

Tags: croquettes, Okara, stir-fry, tofu, weird hippie food

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.