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The great cast iron versus nonstick tofu cookoff, round one 27 March 2007 5:25 pm

Posted by Tracy in : cooking,eating,friends,garden,seasonality,vegan,vegetarian , trackback

I had hoped to do some gardening today, to warm up for wrangling the raised beds at Allison’s place in Corvallis if there’s any energy left for anything but drinking tea after the bike ride there (and I should be up for plenty of fun and games if my recovery from Sunday’s adventures are any indication, but I digress). But back to that warming up idea for a minute, because I need to keep it firmly in mind: It’s so cold and wet outside today that I’m seriously thinking about breaking open the freezer for the last of the split pea soup I made at the end of February. Dangit. I even made a special trip past the hippie home and garden store on my way home from work yesterday, for peat pots and floating row cover material! Whine, whine, whine.

In much better news, for last night’s dinner I made my first attempt at using my biggest and best-seasoned cast-iron skillet for pan-fried tofu, and I am happy to report that it turned out pretty darn delicious! I will now report on the experiment in a vaguely lab report style, because it amuses me.

Equipment, Methods, and Preliminary Observations

I used Soga brand organic extra firm tofu, sold at Trader Joe’s in convenient twin-pack form, with two separately-sealed just under 8-ounce blocks to a package — and yes, the extra packaging does guilt me out a little, but sometimes I just don’t want to use a whole pound of tofu, okay? Again, whine, whine whine. I cut each of the two ~8-ounce blocks into four squares between 1/2 and 3/4 inches thick and drained them on paper towels, Jack Bishop-style while heating one tablespoon of (not organic but non-GMO) canola oil in my big (perhaps even too big) 12-inch nonstick sauté pan and another in the aforementioned cast iron skillet of doom. (A few more details about this pan: it’s the same one I use to bake no-knead bread: 10 1/4-inch top diameter, 9-inch bottom, over 3 inches deep, given to me by my mom along with two smaller cast iron pans when she decided to stop punishing her arthritis with their weight. The big skillet weighs a ton, not-so-metaphorically-speaking; I can lift it with one arm, but not for very long, and only very carefully when it’s hot because all that heavy metal certainly does an amazing job of retaining heat, oh yes. That heat distribution served me and my tofu very well last night, which brings me back to the awesomeness of my experiment.) My stove is (sadly) electric, and the burners are not entirely level, which is an especially annoying problem when I’m using my big nonstick pan, since it’s so much wider than the burner that it really can’t get evenly hot anyway (like I said, in some ways it’s too big). To compensate, I set the burner under the nonstick pan just a little hotter than the one under the cast iron, with some kind of idea about making up for the cast iron’s better heat retention. That and the pan materials were the only differences between the two batches of tofu.

Both were cooked in 1 tablespoon of oil for seven minutes on one side, or until golden brown, then turned and cooked another seven minutes. I am happy to report that the tofu in the cast iron pan stuck only a little, but only in very small patches, and was quite easy to budge even from the sticky spots with ruthless use of a metal spatula — and why not, since it wasn’t like I was going to damage the Teflon or anything. When the tofu was browned on both sides I added marinade:

Except for the mirin, this is exactly the Basic Baked Tofu marinade from Moosewood Restaurant New Classics, and I chose it mostly because it is delicious and also I was terrified to use lemon juice or vinegar on a cast iron pan. After adding the marinade, I cooked the tofu another minute or two on each side, turning to make sure it was well-coated with saucy goodness. The marinade thickened up something fierce and unfortunately like tar or shellac — it stuck to my spatulas and made the tofu stick to its serving plate as well. I rinsed both pans immediately after removing the tofu to the serving plate, and the real surprise of the evening was the fact that the cast iron pan rinsed out more cleanly than the nonstick! No kidding!

Results and Analysis

I served the pan-glazed tofu on a bed of ruby chard sautéed with canola oil, fresh ginger, a splash of soy sauce, and a very generous dousing of rice wine vinegar (since I was determined to have some tartness somewhere even if I was too scared to use it in the tofu marinade). Result: deliciousness! I liked both kinds and couldn’t really tell them apart; there was maybe a touch too much fluffy tofu middle as compared to crispy fried tofu outside for my taste, but I could fix that by cutting thinner slices next time. Peter said he liked the tofu cooked in the nonstick pan a little better because it was crispier, but I don’t know if that’s a result of the nonstick or the higher temperature (curse my lack of experimental rigor!) Our housemate John was very impressed by both and liked the fluffy tofu middle. So we had something for everybody, sort of. Also, as I mentioned in my balsamic baked tofu recipe, I like baked tofu best after it’s had time to cool down and get a little chewier, and since we ate all of yesterday’s experiments I don’t know how they fare as sandwich fillings. Clearly, we need to collect more data! Delicious, delicious data.

  • Liz

    Awesome. Thanks for being the cast-iron tofu guinea pig for me, to choose the appropriate lab metaphor.

  • http://www.CubanJon.com Cuban Jon

    Frosh Chem all over again!! I tend to stray from tofu for purely idiotic reasons I haven’t gotten around to challenge but this post makes my mouth water.

    Also, I’ve subscribed to your RSS Feed today!! Now I get to see every new post on my Desktop Feed Gadget. It also reminds me about how little I post to my own site. :-(

    Miss ya babe!!