Burmese Tofu

March 2, 2010, I am going to sayadaw's place and thinking of what to bring for lunch, in addition of steamed chicken broth. I bought salmons this evening and will bake them tomorrow. I also wanted to try burmese tofu salad but I have to do the tofu myself. This tofu is different from chinese tofu and I like both. I think burmese tofu is originally from Shan state. If you have problem in reading zawgyi font in Internet Explorer, click here. The recipe in Burmese version is also available. တို႕ဖူးက်ိဳနည္းကို ျမန္မာလို ဒီမွာဖတ္ရႈႏိုင္ပါသည္။

I did try burmese tofu with gram flour/besan a number of times before and it was successful. At first, I failed a few times. As usual, I got the right recipe from my sister-in-law's sister. She got from her friend. Finally, I did burmese tofu. I recently found a number of burmese blogs on burmese food. Their method of making tofu is slightly different from mine. Some boil the clear liquid from mixture first then add the deposit slowly. I guess final product will be same. we can check out here.

Recently, I got a new tofu recipe from a nice sister from Oklahoma. I saw the burmese tofu salad on the housewife, facebook and that sister mentioned that she knew how to do tofu from scratch. So, I wanted to try out from scratch and asked her the recipe via email and she willingly shared the recipe. She was very helpful and encouraging. I asked her permission to post the recipe and she allowed me to post the recipe. She is very  nice person although I never meet her before. But I can sense from her emails.

When I made the recipe from yellow pea first time, the texture was rough. Later, I knew why. Because, I sieved the blended yellow pea mixture with Stainless Steel Mesh Sieve instead of cheesecloth/ muslin cloth. I made the same recipe second time with cheesecloth and it was very smooth. The taste was better compared to gram flour tofu. Although it involves more steps, it is worthwhile to try. I  adjusted the ingredient ratio a little bit but the way of doing mention here is directly taken from her email.

Why people do not success making tofu because we usually have no idea on ratio of flour and water. We also don't know how to see whether tofu mixture is ready and can pour into pan to set. Once we know this two facts, we are ready to make.

We know whether the tofu mixture is ready to set by pouring one scoop of mixture into cold water and see whether it sets or soft or hard after a while, 5 minutes. The mixture has to be thick flowing, but not become solid yet and not too watery. If  pour the tofu mixture in watery stage, the tofu may not set or too soft to cut. If the mixture is too thick, the tofu surface might be uneven and it maybe a little bit hard too. I think all depend on person preference. I prefer thick flowing stage, that is good enough for me. I guess very thick stage will be ideal for doing from scratch.

There are a number of ways to eat burmese tofu, either fry in deep oil or doing salad. I finally made tofu with both recipes and brought to sayadaw last night so that the person there can prepare tofu salad today lunch.

Some people want to know this recipe in burmese. So, I typed recipe in burmese. Zawgyi font is needed to download to read burmese. ျမန္မာလိုတို႕ဖးူ က်ိဳနည္းကို ေအာက္ဘက္မွာဆက္ျပီး ေရးသားထားပါတယ္။

Ingredients (yellow pea):

• 250g yellow pea
• 3 - 4cups water

Direction:

1. Soak yellow peas for 6 hours or overnight.
2. Blend the soaked yellow peas and 1.5 or  2 cups of water with blender
3. Sieve the blended yellow peas with cloth and pour the squeezed liquid into the pot.
4. Put another 1.5 or 2 cups of water into already blended yellow peas (also can blend again if you want), sieve with cloth and pour the squeezed liquid into the same pot.
5. Let the liquid mixture sit for 2 hours.
6. Pour the clear part of liquid mixture into a pot and stir continuously  till it boils vigorously for a while.
7.  Then, scoop the tiny particles from bottom of the liquid mixture with the spoon, small portion by portion and pour into the boiling water and stir continuously.
8. The mixture will become thicker. Maybe around 30 - 45 minutes. It will take longer time for more water content.
9. To test whether the mixture is ready to set by scooping a little bit of liquid mixture and pour into cold water for 5 minutes and check the mixture become acceptable solid stage. Get ready the cold water before start boiling tofu.
10. When the liquid mixture is ready (very thick flowing, but not solid yet and not watery too) according to person preference, then pour the mixture into 6 x 3 inches line pan and let it set for a couple of hours at room temperature or in fridge. (Do not keep overnight at room temperature during hot weather as tofu will turn sour.)

Burmese Version
ပါ၀င္ေသာ ပစၥည္းမ်ား

• ပဲဲႃပဳတ္ပဲ (yellow pea) ၂၅၀ ဂရမ္
• ေရ ၁၀၀၀ မီလီလီိတာ

တို႕ဖးူ က်ိဳနည္း
၁. ပဲကို ေရ ၆နာရီႄကာ သို႕မဟုတ္ တစ္ည စိမ္ပါ၊
၂. ပဲနဲ႕ေရ ၅၀၀ မီလီလီိတာ ကို ဘလန္တာ (blender) ထဲထည္႕ႃပီး ေႄကညက္သည္ အထိ ႄကိတ္ပါ၊
၃. ႄကိတ္ႃပီးသားပဲရည္ကို အ၀တ္ပါးပါးေလးနဲ႕ အိုးထဲစစ္ခ်ပါ။ ရလာတဲ႕ပဲအရည္္ကို ၁နာရီ သို႕မဟုတ္ ၂နာရီ ႄကာ အိုးထဲမွာစိမ္ထားပါ။
၄. ေရေအးေအးကို ပန္းကန္ထဲ အဆင္သင္႕ထည္႕ထားပါ။ ေတာ္ႄကာပဲရမရ စမ္းဖို႕ပါ။ တို႕ဖူရရင္ ေလာင္းထဲ႕ဖို႕ ေလးေထာင္႕ဗန္း (အလ်ား ၆ လက္မ အနံ ၃ လက္မ ရွိတဲ႔ဗန္း) အဆင္သင္႔ျပင္ထားပါ။
၅. မီးဖိုေပၚမွာ  အိုးအသစ္တစ္လံုး (ဒန္အိုး သို႕မဟုတ္ non stick) တင္ပါ။ ခုနအိုးထဲက အေပၚယံအရည္ႄကည္မ်ားကို အိုးအသစ္ထဲ ခပ္ထည္႕ျပီး မီးနဲ႕ပြက္ပြက္ဆူေအာင္ တည္ပါ။
၆. ပြက္ပြက္ဆူလာျပီး ခဏႄကာလာတဲ႕အခါ မီးကိုအေႏွးေလ်ွာ႔ခ်လိုက္ပါ။ ျပီးရင္ ခုနအိုးေအာက္မွာ အနည္ထိုင္ေနတဲ႕ ပဲအႏွစ္ရည္ေတြကို နည္းနည္းခ်င္းဆယ္ျပီး  မီးဖိုေပၚတင္ထားထဲ႕အိုးထဲထည္႕ျပီး မီးေအးေအးေလးထားျပီး ေယာက္မနဲ႕ အဆက္မျပတ္ေမႊေပးပါ။ ခုနအိုးထဲက ပဲအႏွစ္ရည္ ကုန္တဲ႕အထိ အဲဒီလိုလုပ္သြားပါ။ ပဲအိုးမတူးေအာင္ သတိထားပါ။
၇. မီးဖိုေပၚတင္ထားထဲ႕အိုးထဲက ပဲအရည္ေတြ တျဖည္းျဖည္းပ်စ္လာျပီး ပဲအနံ႕လည္းေပ်ာက္လာမယ္။ ဆက္ျပီး အဆက္မျပတ္ေမႊႊေပးပါ။ နာရီ၀က ္- ၄၅ မိနစ္ ေလာက္ ေမႊရပါတယ္။
၈. ပဲအရည္ေတြ အရမ္းပ်စ္လာရင္ ခ်လို႕ရမရ ဒီလိုစမ္းလို႕ရပါတယ္။ ခုနက ေရေအးထည္႕ထားတဲ႕ ပန္းကန္ထဲကို  ပဲအပ်စ္ရည္ တစ္ဇြန္းခပ္ထည္႕ လိုက္ပါ။ ၄ - ၅ မိနစ္ ေနလို႕ ပဲခဲသြားျပီး ကိုယ္လိုခ်င္တဲ႕ အေပ်ာ႔အမာ အေနအထားရရင္ အဆင္သင္႔ရွိတဲ႔ဗန္းထဲ ခ်က္ခ်င္း ေလာင္းထည္႕ျပီး ၄ နာရီေလာက္ အေအးခံပါ။
၉. တို႕ဖူးခဲသြားရင္ လီွးျပီး ႄကိုက္သလို သံုးေဆာင္ႏိုင္ပါတယ္။

သတိျပဳရန္ အခ်က္မ်ား
၁. ဆႏြမ္းမႉန္႕နဲ႕ ဆား ကိုထဲ့ျပီး က်ိဳ ႏိုင္ပါတယ္။ ဆႏြမ္းမႉန္႕ ကအေရာင္တင္ အတြက္ပါ။ ဆားကေတာ့ အရသာအတြက္ပါ။ မထဲ့လည္း ရပါတယ္။
၂. နံပါတ္၆ ကစျပီး မီးျပင္းျပင္းနဲ႔ က်ိဳ ရင္ ပဲတူးတတ္သလို။ မတူးရင္ေတာင္ တခါတေလ ခဲေနတဲ႔ တို႕ဖးူ စားရင္းက တူးနံရႏိုင္ ပါတယ္။
၃. တို႕ဖးူ ေလာင္းလို႕ရမရ ေရေအးထဲ မစမ္းပဲ ဒီတိုင္းသိခ်င္ရင္ ေယာက္မနဲ႔ ပဲပ်စ္ရည္ကို ခပ္ျပီးေစာင္းလိုက္ရင္ တစ္တံုးလိုက္က်လာရင္ ရျပီ။ ဒါေပမဲ့ ဗန္းထဲ ေလာင္းထည္႕ရင္ ေတာ့ ပံုသိပ္မလွဘူး။ ပ်စ္ေနေတာ့ မ်က္ႏွာျပင္ကို ျပန္ညိွယူရတယ္။ ဒီတို႕ဖးူေတာ့ ေသခ်ာ အတံုး ျဖစ္တယ္။ အဲဒီေလာက္မမာခ်င္ရင္ေတာ့  ေမႊရတာခက္လာျပီး ၅ - ၁၀ မိနစ္ ေလာက္ႄကာရင္ ခုနလိုေယာက္မေစာင္းလိုက္ရင္ အရမ္းပ်စ္တဲ့ ပဲရည္ စီးဆင္းလာရင္လဲ ဗန္းထဲ ေလာင္းလို႕ရျပီ။
၄. ျမန္မာျပည္လို ရာသီဥတု ပူတဲ့ေဒသေတြမွာ တို႕ဖးူ ကိုေအးသြားရင္ ေရခဲသတၱာထဲမွာ ထားပါ။ သို႕မို႕ဆို  တို႕ဖးူ  တိုးသြားပါလိမ့္မယ္။
၅. တို႕ဖးူ ရရင္ ဗန္းထဲ ခ်က္ခ်င္း ေလာင္းထည္႕ရပါတယ္။ သို႕မို႕ဆို တို႕ဖးူစျပီးခဲလာရင္ ေလာင္းရတာ အဆင္မေျပျဖစ္ တတ္တယ္။
၆. ဒီလုပ္နည္းက အခ်ိဳးအစားကေတာ့ တခါစားစာပါ။ လုပ္နည္းကၽြမ္းက်င္ သြားရင္ အခ်ိဳးအစား ၂ဆ တင္ရင္ေတာ့ ၂ ေယာက္ အ၀စား လို႕ရပါတယ္။

 Here is the recipe with gram flour. I doubled the recipe and pour into 7 x 7 inches baking tin.

Ingredients(gram flour):

• 1 cup gram flour
• 3 cups water (1 cup water + 2 cups boiling water)
• 1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder, optional
• pinch of  salt, optional

Direction:

1. Pour 1 cup of water into pot. Add 1 cup gram flour and stir well to ensure all gram flour are dissolved. Add in turmeric and salt and mix well. Then,  let it sit for 30 minutes or also can boil immediately.
2. Get ready a bowl of cold water to test tofu mixture.
3. Boil the mixture with slow fire until mixture thicken. Continue stirring the mixture. At the same time, boil 2 cups of water.
4.  Whenever the mixture becomes thicken, pour the 1/2 cup or 1 cup of boiling water into the mixture and stir continuously until 2 cups of boiling water use up or there is no pea smell from the mixture. Be careful, not to add too much water at one time as the liquid will spill over times go by and slightly burn your hand or face.
5. The mixture will become thicker, approximately 30 minutes.  It will take longer time if more boiling water is added.
6. To test whether the mixture is ready to set by scooping a little bit of liquid mixture and pour into cold water for 5 minutes and check the mixture become acceptable solid stage.
7. When the liquid mixture is ready (thick flowing, but not solid yet and not watery too) according to person preference, then pour the mixture into 6 x 3 inches pan. Let it set for a couple of hours at room temperature or in fridge. (Do not keep overnight at room temperature during hot weather as tofu will turn sour.)

Burmese Version
ပါ၀င္ေသာ ပစၥည္းမ်ား

• ပဲအစိမ္းမႉန္႕(gram flour) ၁၅၀ ဂရမ္
• ေရ ၇၅၀ မီလီလီိတာ
• ဆႏြမ္းမႉန္႕ နဲ႕ ဆား အေနေတာ္

တို႕ဖးူ က်ိဳနည္း
၁. အို္တစ္လံုး (ဒန္အိုး သို႕မဟုတ္ non stick)  ထဲမွာ ပဲအစိမ္းမႉန္႕ ၊ ဆႏြမ္းမႉန္႕ ၊ ဆား အေနေတာ္ နဲ႕ ေရ ၂၅၀ မီလီလီိတာ ကို ေရာျပီး ပဲမႉန္႕ေတြေရထဲေပ်ာ္ ေအာင္ေခ်ပါ္၊ ပဲမႉန္႕အားလံုးေပ်ာ္သြားရင္ နာရီ၀က္ေလာက္ ထားလိုက္ပါ။ မထားပဲစက်ိဳရင္လဲ ရျပီ။ ဆႏြမ္းမႉန္႕ ကအေရာင္တင္ အတြက္ပါ။ဆႏြမ္းမႉန္႕ ပါရင္ ရန္ကုန္မွာေရာင္းတဲ့ တို႕ဖူးနဲ႕ပိုတူပါတယ္။ ဆားကေတာ့ အရသာအတြက္ပါ။
၂. ေရေအးေအးကို ပန္းကန္ထဲ အဆင္သင္႕ထည္႕ထားပါ။ ေတာ္ႄကာပဲရမရ စမ္းဖို႕ပါ။ တို႕ဖူရရင္ ေလာင္းထဲ႕ဖို႕ ေလးေထာင္႕ဗန္း (အလ်ား ၆ လက္မ အနံ ၃ လက္မ ရွိတဲ႔ဗန္း) အဆင္သင္႔ ျပင္ထားပါ။
၃. ေရ ၅၀၀ မီလီလီိတာ ကို အိုးတစ္လံုးနဲ႕ ပြက္ပြက္ဆူေအာင္ တည္ပါ။ ခဏေနရင္  ပဲအႏွစ္ရည္ထဲ ေလာင္းထဲ႕ဖို႕ပါ။ ဓာတ္ဗူးရွိရင္ေတာ႔ ဓာတ္ဗူးထဲက ေရေႏြး သံုးလို႕ရပါတယ္။
၄. မီးဖိုေပၚမွာ  ပဲမႉန္႕ရည္အံုး တင္ျပီး မီးေအးေအးနဲ႕တည္ပါ။ေယာက္မနဲ႕ အဆက္မျပတ္ေမႊေပးပါ။
၅. အိုးထဲက ပဲအရည္ေတြ တျဖည္းျဖည္းပ်စ္္္ခဲလာရင္ ေရေႏြးပူပူကို ၁၂၅ - ၂၅၀ မီလီလီိတာ (ခြက္တ၀က္ သို႕မဟုတ္ ၁ခြက္) ေလာင္းထဲ႕ျပီး ဆက္ေမႊႊေပးပါ။ ပဲခဲေတြ ေရေႏြး နဲ႕ေတြ႕ျပီး အရည္ျပန္ေပ်ာ္ျပီး  အုန္းႏို႕ေခါက္ခြဲအရည္ လိုျဖစ္လာ ပါလိမ့္မယ္။ ဆက္ေမႊႊေပးပါ။ အဲလိုပဲ ပ်စ္လာတိုင္း ေရေႏြးပူပူ ေလာင္းထဲ႕ျပီး ဆက္ေမႊႊေပးပါ။ ေရေႏြးပူပူ ၅၀၀ မီလီလီိတာ ကုန္တဲ႕အထိဆက္လုပ္ေပးပါ။ ပဲအိုးမတူးေအာင္ သတိထားပါ။
၆. တျဖည္းျဖည္းနဲ႕ ပဲအရည္ေတြ အရမ္းပ်စ္လာျပီး ပဲအနံ႕လည္းေပ်ာက္လာလိမ့္မယ္။ နာရီ၀က္ေလာက္ ေမႊရပါတယ္။
၇. ပဲအရည္ေတြ အရမ္းပ်စ္လာရင္ ခ်လို႕ရမရ ဒီလိုစမ္းလို႕ရပါတယ္။ ခုနက ေရေအးထည္႕ထားတဲ႕ ပန္းကန္ထဲကို  ပဲအပ်စ္ရည္ တစ္ဇြန္းခပ္ထည္႕ လိုက္ပါ။ ၄ - ၅ မိနစ္ ေနလို႕ ပဲခဲသြားျပီး ကိုယ္လိုခ်င္တဲ႕ အေပ်ာ႔အမာ အေနအထားရရင္ အဆင္သင္႔ရွိတဲ႔ဗန္းထဲ ခ်က္ခ်င္း ေလာင္းထည္႕ျပီး ၄ နာရီေလာက္ အေအးခံပါ။
၈. တို႕ဖူးခဲသြားရင္ လီွးျပီး ႄကိုက္သလိုသံုးေဆာင္ႏိုင္ပါတယ္။