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This dish has been on the menu for a couple of months now, and I’m only just getting around to putting it up online, mostly because Dirt Candy has been so insanely busy that I’ve barely had a chance to breathe. The end of the summer just sort of snuck up on me, and suddenly we’re halfway through October.

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Excuses aside, meet the Crispy Coconut Poached Tofu, on Braised Hearts of Palm, with Cucumber, Chinese Chives and Salsify, in a Shiso Galangal Sauce with Cucumber Puree, Spicy Cucumber Relish and a Fried Pickle (a Frickle!).

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To me, it’s the most sophisticated and complex dish on the menu right now, and below the jump I’ll tell you why.

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I knew that the Crispy Tofu with Broccolini needed to get switched up and after a trip to Golden Mall, the scuzzy but amazing temple of Chinese food out in Flushing, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. When I was out there I had a dish made with braised cucumber and Chinese chives at Xi’an Famous Foods and it really opened my eyes. Rarely do cooked cucumbers appear in a dish in the West – they’re another vegetable where we think of their texture just as much as we think of their flavor – but cooking them changed their taste so profoundly that I had to do something with them. The dish I had was spicy and juicy and crunchy all at the same time, and I decided that using that flavor would be perfect for a new crispy tofu dish. Previously, all my crispy tofu dishes have been centered around really luscious, really deep beurre blanc sauces, but I wanted to make something that would appeal more to the salad crowd who want to taste that super-vegetable flavor. But without beurre blanc sauce, the first step was figuring out how I was going to get fat into the dish. Fat carries flavor and people expect that taste when they eat at a restaurant. This time around, I decided to get the fat into the tofu itself, rather than finding it in the beurre blanc sauce, and so I poached the tofu in coconut milk for a really long time to make it tender and creamy.

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I needed other vegetables besides cucumber, and I wanted vegetables that matched its texture, so I added heart of palm, which has a creamy and tangy taste, and salsify, which is nutty, salty and crunchy all at once. Then came a ton of stir fried Chinese chives as a tribute to Xi’an Famous Foods. At the very end, I mix in a little bit of fresh, uncooked cucumber just to really get in the raw cucumber flavor everyone’s used to.

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The sauce is a deep, dark green Shiso Galangal sauce. Shiso and cucumber go well together, each heightening the flavor of the other, but it was harder to figure out that I needed the galangal. At first I was using ginger in the sauce but it was too much and the ginger overwhelmed the taste of the cucumbers and the peppiness of the shiso. But galangal is like a more floral ginger and when I finally realized that’s what it needed the sauce came together perfectly, like it had just been waiting for me to figure it out. There are little bright green dots on the plate of a fresh cucumber puree, just to get another dimension of the flavor of cucumber into the dish.

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On top of the crispy tofu I repeat some of the elements of the dish in a cucumber relish that is diced incredibly fine: galangal, ginger, avocado, garlic, lime juice and Thai chili peppers which gives everything a welcome kick.

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Being Dirt Candy, something needs to be fried and so it’s topped with a my lacy version of a frickle (a friend pickle, in case you haven’t been to the county fair, recently).

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The result is one of the most sophisticated dishes on the menu. I’ve noticed that the folks who like the Crispy Tofu with Cucumber are the ones who really love vegetables and want that beautiful, green taste. When you eat this dish, more than almost any other dish on the menu right now, you’re really getting a heart and a head full of the true taste of cucumber, in all its variations and in all its green glory.

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