The role of fish will now be played by tofu
Easy vegan dinner ideas!
When I was in grade nine, I got addicted to watching The Young and the Restless after school. I’ve always found excruciatingly boring dialogue and stupid plots somehow soothing. I also found it fascinating how, when a new actor took over a role, a voice of god simply announced it and you had to deal. In my case, god announced one day, “The role of Ashley Abbott will now be played by Shari Shattuck,” and I tell you I was not impressed. Ashley Abbott simply was Brenda Epperson to me, and nobody else (I know Eileen Davidson is most people’s Classic Ashley, but not mine)! I knew I had to evolve or stop watching, so I did what I had to do. Sure, it was enraging for the first few episodes. Shattuck looked too sly to be Ashley, her chemistry with Victor Newman was off, where were her killer bear claw bangs? But three afternoons later, I had to concede that Shattuck fit into Genoa City just fine; she was, indeed, a credible Jabot Cosmetics executive — maybe more credible than Epperson’s? In the end, while things were definitely different, they were just as enjoyable — if not moreso — in the same vapid, time-sucking way.
Over the last few years, I’ve come to feel the same way about tofu-as-fish minus the vapid, time-sucking thing. Back in my meat-eating days, I didn’t make fish a ton, but I did love how quick and easy it was to cook. Sometimes I still crave the mild-but-salty umami of it all and the light, delicate texture. And I definitely want in on the big-flavour/weeknight-easy vibe of all those NYT fast fish recipes, you know?
When I first went vegan, I typically used tempeh when I wanted to make a fish-like dish, and with good results, too (see pic below). But while tempeh is sort of naturally flaky-adjacent texture-wise, and absorbs a marinade well, it’s still always going to taste pretty strongly of itself, what with its web of magical mycelium holding its soybeans in place. Totally rad, but not always precisely the right casting choice for fish to my palate.
For a mild-but-umami flavour, the natural choice would, of course, be tofu, but I had tried marinating and braising it the way I did my tempeh in the past, and it left something to be desired in the taste and texture departments. Then around 2020, all the vegan bloggers suddenly started slicing “fillets” of tofu in a certain way to mimic the flakiness of fish. The trend whirled through the vegan internet, some soaking tofu in marinades of seaweed and beet juice to make it pink like salmon, others adding crispy nori “skin.”
By this point in my vegan journey, I had learned from experience that marinating cold tofu is never going to yield something that actually tastes like fish, or that even tastes all that great-as-its-own-thing to my salt-thirsty palate. To quote forever-fave and tofu doyenne,
:Contrary to popular belief, tofu is not very porous [unless it’s been frozen, then thawed]. It is composed mostly of water, and the curds are often too dense to allow marinades to permeate deeper than a few millimetres. You can certainly marinate tofu if you want — it’ll probably retain some flavour — but it’s pretty ineffective, and I’ve never seen it done in China.1
Preach. No offence to these early 2020’s “tofish” recipes, I’m sure they taste decent, and the slicing technique would allow for more marinade to get in the tofu and sort of pool in the crevices, which is a good thing! I may try one day. But it was the idea to score the tofu to create flaky texture that interested me the most about these recipes.
When I tried for the first time, I decided to just score my tofu “fillets” with a simple cross-hatched pattern like in the photo above rather than go for Big Verisimilitude via fussy knife work. If you like fussy knife work, by all means give loads of incisions a try, it might be flakier yet. But I have found that cross-hatching works great to provide a satisfying pull-apart texture (you can easily eat these tofu fillets with a fork). Cross-hatching also creates nice grooves for both the salt (see below), and whatever topping, brothy sauce, or oily business I’m using (see further below) to settle into and create flavour throughout the fillet. In concert with the cross-hatching, I’ve settled on three other keys to make my tofu ready to appear in the role of fish:
Tons of salt
Thanks to the first fish recipe I tried with this cross-hatching technique, I now always salt the hell out of my cross-hatched tofu fillets and let them hang out — dry brine I guess? — while I prepare my side dishes, spice rubs, broths, etc. For me, “salting the hell out of” means a scant teaspoon of fine sea salt for 350 grams of tofu. After slicing and scoring, I sprinkle salt on both sides of each fillet and try to let them sit at least 15 minutes, ideally 20-30.
Powdered seaweed
I feel like a lot of people don’t like seaweed, or are afraid to cook with seaweed, or think they only like the little seaweed snax and sushi and nothing else, and I think that’s a shame. I didn’t always love seaweed myself, but on a road trip to New Brunswick in 2008, I learned about eating dulse like chips and became completely obsessed. I will never forget going to Roland’s Sea Vegetables on Grand Manan Island, a little shack where a woman sat bagging seaweed alone, blasting Rihanna’s “Take a Bow” while I filled a giant bag with freshly picked dulse, kombu, and nori. Still one of the best shopping experiences of my life!
Anyway, it was through dulse (which seems to be in trouble, gotta research this more, maybe it’s a bad rec right now!) that I learned that seaweed doesn’t always taste “fishy” in the same way that chefs are always telling you that good fish doesn’t smell or taste “fishy.” Maritimers suggest fried dulse tastes like bacon, and they’re kind of right (says this vegan). Most seaweed just adds umami in spades and a kind of briny, sometimes slightly sweet flavour. I find dulse least “fishy” of all, with kelp (also known as kombu) coming in second on that front. If you like things a bit more fish-forward, which I sometimes do, try dried wakame (I haven’t seen wakame powdered in the store, but you can crush it with a blender or mortar and pestle no problem). Lately I’ve been sprinkling aonori flakes (also known as green laver or green nori) on all my fish-inspired dishes after cooking both for the pretty green flecks and the plantbased source of inosinate and guanylate, the nucleotides that make meat taste so good. If you like things super-fishy, you could also drizzle on some algae oil at the end (get it in capsules, sold as a plant based Omega 3 supplement. Just make sure it’s not strawberry flavoured or something!), but it’s expensive and I don’t do this often. Anyway, if you think you don’t like seaweed, but you do like fish, or you’d like to jazz up your tofu in a new way, I urge you to give it another go!
A recipe with lots of punchy flavour via a topping, brothy sauce, or oily business
Below, I’ve included notes on a bunch of fish recipes I’ve personally converted from fish to tofu with good results, divided into three categories of recipe I see often. I’m sorry that some are paywalled; I’ve included gift links for NYT recipes, the Alison Roman recipes are free, and the others offer a few free recipes per month. My goal here was to give a bunch of examples of how I convert recipes, and to hopefully leave you with some ideas and techniques that inspire you to riff to your own taste. I have no illusions that these recipes taste the same using tofu; just that applying these techniques and ingredients used in fish dishes also makes for delicious tofu dishes that are fast and easy, with no pressing, marinating, or pre-freezing needed. If you’re a fan of fish, I think you’ll find that the role of fish now played by tofu is different, but also great. Much like a new actor on your favourite soap, the change has its own merits, such as, just for example: tofu’s not a dead sentient creature hauled from our depleted seas!✌️
Recipes with a topping
The first fish recipe I tried with the cross-hatched tofu technique was this Broiled Spice-Rubbed Red Snapper from America’s Test Kitchen. This is the one that taught me to liberally salt the tofu slabs in advance and let them hang out while I prep everything else. As above, I use about a teaspoon to salt 350 grams of sliced, scored tofu, and I think it makes a big flavour difference, truly. This recipe also taught me to bloom my spice rub with boiling water first, then add the oil. I do this with lots of spice mixes now, and it’s a great trick. I add a teaspoon of powdered seaweed to the rub, use gochugaru instead of ancho chile and leave out the cayenne because I am a spice wimp, but otherwise I make the rub as written (sometimes I use lemon instead of lime). I like this one so much that now I mix up a quintuple recipe of the spice rub ingredients, keep that in a jar (weirdly labelled “snapper”) and make this dish once a month at least. With the spices pre-mixed, it’s especially easy. To make it even easier, you could probably use a good quality store-bought “blackened fish” or Creole spice mix instead of making your own.
For recipes like this with a thick coating of spices and/or breadcrumbs on top of the fillets, I add about a teaspoon of powdered seaweed to the rub and just proceed from there. I very lightly oil the bottom of the sheet pan, too, so that the tofu doesn’t stick. Other nice recipes with a spice rub I’ve tried with tofu include:
Mahi ba Somagh (Sumac Roasted Fish) by Naz Deravian (gift link); score and salt the tofu as above, double the spices and citrus zest, add a teaspoon of powdered seaweed to the spices. I think I roasted this one for a bit, then broiled at the end.
I just make my own herb, panko, seaweed, umeboshi paste (sometimes), and chopped caper topping; basically a mix of those things I just mentioned — sometimes fresh herbs, sometimes dried ones bloomed in boiling water as above — broil until the crumbs are crispy, and douse with fresh lemon juice at the end.
Last week for a Lunar New Year treat, I veganized J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Cantonese-Style Steamed Fish (gift link) using scored, salted tofu. This one is different from the above as it doesn’t have a spice rub, just fresh aromatics. I put a bunch of chopped ginger, scallions, and cilantro stems on top of the scored salted tofu, sprinkled with kelp powder, then roasted at 350 in an oiled pan for twenty minutes or so, so that bottoms were very lightly browned, and the aromatics were softened on top, but not browned. Then I doused in the soy-based sauce (dousing hot tofu with soy sauce will always be better than cold-marinating imo!), piled on the herbs, and sizzled the lot with hot oil as instructed. Very fun, very delicious, very pretty, and this is the only picture I took??
Recipes with a brothy sauce
Another kind of fish recipe I see a lot and often covet is the “brothy” variety, like Shilpa Uskokovic’s Brothy Coconut-Mustard Fish (inspired by a Bengali dish called Shorshe lish bhapa), and Alison Roman’s Tomato-Poached Fish With Chile Oil and Herbs. For those, I find a super-basic recipe for the broiled tofu stands in for the white fish beautifully. Here’s what I do:
Score and salt the tofu as above, then sprinkle on some powdered seaweed of your choice, a little brine from a jar of capers if you have it (maybe some lemon juice if not?), and some olive oil. Broil until lightly browned, seven minutes or so in my oven. Then the fillets are ready to slide into the brothy sauces you’ve prepared along the lines of the recipes above, with the following veganizations:
For Roman’s recipe, I add a little umeboshi paste, kelp powder, and soy sauce to stand in for the fish sauce (and the flavour the fish fillets would normally bring to the broth).
For Uskokovic’s recipe I sub maple syrup for the honey. Personally I only use 1 can coconut milk and a little water (too full cans is too rich for me!) and I usually add chopped kale for the vegetable component. If I don’t have a fresh chile, I just use chile flakes.
For either of these, or other recipes like them, you can just chuck the sliced, scored tofu in the broth un-broiled if you’re short on time, and add a little seaweed powder to the sauce if you like. I’ve done it, and it still tastes great!
Recipes with oily business
This is the latest category I’ve been experimenting with, and I don’t really know if it’s safe to say I have the technique dialled in, nor am I sure this is a category of recipe the way the others are? But whatever, here are two more fish recipes I’ve recently veganized:
Eric Kim’s Scallion Oil Fish (gift link). This one is dead-easy. I salt and score the tofu as always, sprinkle with kelp, do the scallion oil as per the recipe, and leave the heat on in the pan a little longer than Kim instructs to get a teeny bit of colour on the bottom of my tofu for extra flavour. This one I sprinkle liberally with aonori flakes afterward. Delicious! I have done this with both extra firm and silken tofu, both good (the silken tofu breaks apart quite a bit, but sometimes fish does, too)! It’s a lot of oil, but you can use it to dress your potatoes or rice or bread and/or green vegetables that you serve this with.
I’ve also just started experimenting with Alison Roman’s slow-roasted salmon recipe because I’m interested in what the technique does to my beloved bean curd. I’ve been curious about fully confit-ing it, too, but that’s an experiment for another day. So far, the slow roasting in lots of oil is going pretty well, but I find it tastes better the next day when more oil has worked into the grooves maybe. It gets more flavourful and somehow juicy. Anyway, to do this one, I salted and scored the tofu as per usual, laid out some little nori squares and placed the tofu on top (just for fun), added a 1/2 tsp kelp powder to 3/4 cup of olive oil (you can strain the kelp-y oil and use it later for other things), sprinkled another 1/4 tsp of kelp powder on top of the tofu, then added gochugaru, pepper, and thinly sliced mandarins and lemons. I roasted at 325 for about 30 minutes, basting with oil from time to time (careful, it can sputter!) I thought this was good, but a bit lacking in flavour initially. I was on the verge of dousing in soy sauce, but my partner found it salty enough, so I held off and enjoyed it. Going to keep working on this, let me know if you do, too!
I hope all of this is helpful in some way?? Let me know if you have questions! If there’s a fish recipe you love or used to love, and you’d like me to help you convert it for tofu, please say so in the comments — it would be a delight and my honour!
From Che’s amazing book The Chinese Vegan Kitchen, which I will never stop telling people to buy.
it has been a long time since I read a title this good!!!
I'll be returning to this again and again, I can already tell! As a vegan, I often see good looking meat dishes online and can usually work out how to convert them pretty easily but what has always had me stumped are poached fish dishes with deliciously delicate broths/ sauces. You've cleared a lot up for me! All these dishes look wonderful