Most of the dishes at Dirt Candy are designed around a specific ingredient, and the Crispy Tofu with Green Ragout is our tribute to soy.

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Since 220 AD, China’s been turning out tofu and soy milk, and the soy bean is used in everything from Crisco to vodka. It’s a go-to vegetable (actually a legume) for a lot of processed food and it’s mostly associated in the US with tofu, which doesn’t do it any favors*. But don’t let its down-market associations and industrial uses fool you. Soy is one of the staples of a lot of different cuisines (Chinese, Korean), it’s full of protein and, despite claims to the contrary, it won’t make you gay. Soy beans have a smooth, lightly nutty flavor and our Crispy Tofu with Green Ragout contains more soy than you can shake a stick at.

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First up the dish is built around tofu. It’s hard not to think of tofu as those flabby, tasteless bricks you get at the supermarket but it doesn’t have to be that way. When tofu is fresh, or even just prepared correctly, it should have a woodsy flavor and a nice mouth-feel. We cover our tofu with a crispy tofu skin, which is what you get when you skim off the top layer of liquid while making soy milk. It dries into a sheet (called yuba) and you can find it in Chinese food, especially Chinese vegetarian food where it’s often called upon to stand in for the role usually played by meat, or it’s used as a wrapper. Chinese vegetarian food comes from an amazing tradition of temple cooking, and often dishes were designed to have elements that looked like meat, but surprised your mouth by tasting totally different. We use the tofu skin to give extra texture to the tofu in this dish because if you cook tofu for long enough to char it slightly you wind up making it tough and dry. Using the tofu skin allows us to give it texture (crisp on the outside, silky on the inside) without drying it out.

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Then we use edamame beans as part of the green ragout. Edamame are just immature soy beans, meaning that they’re green, extremely crispy and they think Benny Hill is funny. The sauce for the dish is a very light beurre blanc (white butter sauce) made with limes so that it’s not too rich and it’s drizzled with white soy sauce, which also cuts the richness**. What we wind up with is a dish that uses the richness of butter to accent the subtle, nutty taste of soy, which is delivered as crunchy edamame, soft tofu, crispy tofu skin and as a liquid. It’s the closest thing to an ode to soy you’re ever going to get.

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* all tofu is not bad, but if you’ve ever had fresh tofu and then tasted supermarket tofu you’ll agree that what most of us think of as tofu is to tofu what Kraft singles are to cheese.

** the vegan version of this dish uses coconut milk instead of butter in the beurre blanc, to make a really rich, creamy white sauce that’s given some kick with limes.