May 8, 2015 New Recipe – Squash Dofu

May 8, 2015 New Recipe – Squash Dofu

I thought I had bought all the ingredients for MaPo Dofu: pork steak, dried wood ear, fresh shitake mushrooms, pasilla chili, fresh garlic and fresh ginger, onion, and tofu. 

But when I was ready to make it at 6:00 tonight, I found that I was missing an eggplant.  I looked in the vegetable crisper and found some cabbage and two yellow crook neck squashes.  Suzette then suggested that we use one of the acorn squashes she had brought home this week.  I sliced up the yellow crook neck squashes and peeled the acorn squash and cut it into ½ cubes and cubed the ½ of an onion and pasilla chili into bite sized pieces and put them into the wok with the cut up pieces of ½ head of cabbage.  We started sautéing the squashes, cabbage, and onion.  I then finely minced about 1½ Tbsp. of garlic and 1 Tbsp. of ginger and added that to the wok and Suzette sliced several shitake mushrooms and added the slices to the wok.

The mixture in the wok was too hot and was scorching, so Suzette added 1 ½ cups of chicken stock to it and I added 1 Tbsp. of Chinese Rice Cooking wine and 1 Tbsp. of sweet Japanese soy.  Then I cut up about 1½ lb. of pork steak and Suzette sautéed that in a separate skillet with peanut oil to braise it and then added that to the wok while I diced up 19 oz. of medium tofu and added that to the wok.. I then put 1 Tbsp. of dried wood ear into 2 cups of hot water and added that to the wok after letting the wood ear rehydrate for a couple of minutes.  This brought the liquid in the wok up to the top of all the ingredients, which is important because the ingredients need to stew together.  We decided to leave the cover off the wok so the liquid could reduce naturally.  

Suzette then made 1 cup of basmati rice using 2 cups of water lightly flavored with chicken stock.

When the chicken stock came to a boil she added 1 cup of rice and covered the pot and reduced the heat to the lowest temperature and let it simmer for 30 minutes.

I had bought baby bok choy, but we decided that that was too much food.  After about 30 minutes of stewing the ingredients in the wok had melded together and the liquid level had reduced dramatically, so that the ingredients looked like a stew. We decided not to further thicken the mixture.  Suzette said that there is something akin to pectin in squash that causes it to naturally thicken when cooked.

We each ladled rice into a pasta bowl and then ladled some of the Squash Dofu mixture onto the rice.  

The result was a lighter pleasant combination of flavors, than the dish has when eggplant is used, with a decidedly squashy flavor.  I preferred the natural squash flavor to the obscured flavors resulting from use of thickening ingredients. Other than squash there was no dominant flavor, so the ingredients had integrated into a light stew.  What amazed me was that the rock hard acorn squash had cooked into the stew.  The acorn squash cubes were soft and flavorful.  I will use it in other stews in the future.

We both liked the dish.  I drank Pinot Grigio with dinner and Suzette drank a Negra Modelo.

This experiment of substituting squashes and cabbage instead of eggplant shows that other types of harder vegetables, such as squash and cabbage, and using more liquid earlier in the cooking process work as well or better than using eggplant in MaPo Dofu and result in a lighter more flavorful dish because there is not as much stir frying with peanut oil.

Bon Appétit