Using the wok for Mapo Tofu
Recently I purchased a wok. It was a lazy endeavor. I didn't even have to leave my chair and go to some wok store in Chinatown or anything. For the curious, it was one of these. Flat bottomed and made of carbon steel, this thing is quite hefty on my stove. It took me a while to season the wok and it's no where near being pitch black the way really old woks are. And sometimes I'm not just not prepared for the amount of smoke generated when I'm stir frying. It's a completely different animal than using a sautee pan. There are dishes to cook where you can escape the smoke though. Mapo Doufu is one dish that's easy to prepare if you have a pantry full of Asian ingredients like sesame oil, chili paste, and rice wine. The only things you really need to buy is ground pork, tofu, Sichuan Peppercorns, and the Asian trinity (garlic, scallions, ginger root).
There are plenty of good recipes for Mapo Tofu on Google. There might be variations like toasting your Sichuan peppercorns or buying a particular brand of chili bean paste, or a particular brand/texture of doufu/tofu. Some people might even say if it's not silken doufu/tofu (which is the super soft kind), then it's not the right way to cook the dish. Authenticity is overrated. Just look at the recipes out there and tweak it accordingly to your tastes.
Little tweaks are what sets recipes apart from each other. For a simple dish like Mapo Doufu, I can tell you that toasting the Sichuan/Szechuan Peppercorns before crushing them doesn't seem to make all that much of a difference. The peppercorns are just there for the fragrance and numbing effect. You add enough and it'll be mouth numbing. If you use silken doufu/tofu, you run into the problem of moving the bean curd around in the wok, because they're so delicate and break with any touch.
The main ratios that I think are important is probably the tofu to ground pork ratio. Some folks even use ground beef for more flavor, but the doufu/tofu to meat ratio is something like one package (13 to 15 oz) to quarter pound (4 oz) of meat. The other thing to play with is sauce because like many Chinese dishes, Mapo doufu calls for a corn starch slurry as a thickening agent. I would make more than what's called for in your recipe, and add more if the sauce is too watery for your liking.
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it seems that you need more chili paste and a bit more of corn starch to thicken the appearance.
chicago
March 9, 2011 1:04 am
mmm, I think it looks very nice. I love tofu, maybe I would only skip the pork.
tofu
March 16, 2011 2:53 pm