Find us next Saturday at the OCH Festival Art Market, 4/14, from 1o a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Zeitgeist Arts Center. Along with two live bands and an array of fantastic vendors, we’ll be serving from our most varied menu to date, with handy finger foods ranging from shiitake mushroom and horseradish beignets to savory tomato tarts and peanut pepper cabbage wraps with goat yogurt and cucumbers. Check in this coming week for our full menu.
We served this as our special two weekends ago — the dish could fool someone into thinking that it’s a salad, with all of the fresh vegetables perched on top of the delicious fried tofu. The cherry tomatoes and dandelion greens play off of the spice and rich caramelized flavors of the horseradish sauce. The colors and textures are beautiful too: with the golden crunchy skin of the tofu next to the saturated colors of the greens and the sauce. We hope you’ll try out this recipe for yourself and come up with your own variations.
Ingredients: tofu, nutritional yeast, rice flour; dandelion greens, cherry tomatoes, a lemon; shallots, oyster mushrooms, hot peppers, horseradish, rice wine, soy sauce, rice vinegar, salt and sugar
1. To make the sauce, cook minced shallots with minced oyster mushrooms and minced hot peppers on medium heat until everything is a dark brown, stirring every once in a while to prevent anything from burning. This will take a while. Deglaze the pan with rice wine. Add soy sauce and minced horseradish and cook for another 10 minutes. Add sugar and salt to taste — it should taste pretty salty. Add rice vinegar and cook on low heat for another 5-10 minutes, or until the flavors have combined and the sauce has thickened to a syrupy consistency.
2. Drain and cut the tofu into 1/4 inch thick slices. Prepare a batter that is 1 part nutritional yeast to 1 part rice flour and coat the slices of tofu with this batter. Fry the slices of tofu in 1/4 inch of oil. The tofu and batter should sizzle immediately when they enter the pan, and each side should only take 30-45 seconds to become golden brown. Drain fried tofu on paper towels.
3. Sprinkle dandelion greens and sliced cherry tomatoes generously over the tofu, with a big spoonful of the sauce on top and a wedge of lemon on the side. We added fresh crowder peas to the dish, too, because they contrast well in texture and flavor with the tofu.
tsainola 