13 May /15

Tofu

When comes to tofu, there seems not to be a middle way, one either likes it or does not even want to consider it. The high in protein curd, made by coagulating soy milk, is the most widely spread replacement of meat in vegetarian dishes.

The cheese-like soy curd is low in calories and high in iron and many see it as a healthy addition to anyone’s nutrition plan. Though, on the other hand, soy products contain high levels of goitrogens which can lead to thyroid problems and hormonal imbalance in especially women.

Tofu originated in China some 2000 years ago and later spread throughout Easy Asia as an important part of the vegetarian Buddhism diet. The original Chinese name of the soybean cheese transcribed tou-fu and literally translated as “curded, fermented bean”. The English term came from the Japanese borrowing tōfu.

The first European document with reference to tofu dates back to 1603, when the earliest dictionary of the Japanese language compiled by Europeans, a Spanish dictionary on the Japanese language listed and defined the word.

The earliest English-language source that mentions tofu in connection with Japan comes from 1613, when Captain John Saris – the captain of the first English voyage to Japan – described the typical Japanese diet not including any diary products but plenty of soybean cheese: “Of Cheese [probably tofu] they have plenty. Butter they make none, neither will they eat any milk, because they hold it to be as blood, nor tame beasts.”

The first traveller to describe the process of making tofu in China is Domingo Fernández de Navarrete, in his book A Collection of Voyages and Travels : “They draw the milk out of the kidney-beans, and turning it, make great cakes of it like cheeses”’ He also reported on how widely consumed the soybean product was: “the most usual, common and cheap sort of food all China abounds in, and which all men in that empire eat, from the emperor to the meanest Chinese.”

Tofu is believed to had been firstly produced in Europe in 1880, in France, for the Society for Acclimatization – the first organisation in the Western world to actively research and promote the use of soyfoods.

The earliest tofu company in the USA was founded in 1878 and the Europe’s first commercial soyfoods manufacturer opened in 1910.

A century later, tofu is produced and consumed on a global basis and a wide variety is available on the market, to only name raw, fermented, flavoured, frozen, smoked and fried.