Bonus recipe: Sesame Tofu

Brian and I don't order takeout very often, so when we do, we like to get something we can't easily make at home. Our favorite takeout dish is the sesame tofu from Sultan Wok, a local Chinese place. It's chunks of tofu, fried to give it a chewy outer crust, but still soft on the inside, soaked in a tangy-sweet sesame sauce and accompanied by broccoli. Definitely not something we could make for ourselves...

...until Brian went and figured out how.

It started when were out for a walk one Saturday afternoon, and we strolled past the Sultan Wok and caught the scent of the sesame tofu and thought, "Gee, that would be nice for dinner," but for some reason ordering in that day wasn't really an option for us. So Brian went searching for a sesame tofu recipe online and came across this one at Nummy Kitchen that looked about right. He made no substitutions, but in the places where the recipe offered choices, he went with:

• dry sherry
• rice wine vinegar
• a half-and-half mixture of brown and white sugar
• just 1/4 tsp. of chili paste, because I am a spice wimp

Also, while the recipe calls for 2 cups of cornstarch for dredging the tofu, he estimates he used "well less than half" that amount.

His creation didn't look exactly like what we're used to getting from the Sultan Wok. For one thing, his tofu chunks were smaller than Sultan Wok's, which usually took two bites for me to eat. Also, all the components—tofu, sauce, sesame seeds—were in separate containers, so we had to assemble it on the fly, dishing out some tofu and broccoli over a bowl of rice, spooning sauce over that, and sprinkling the sesame seeds on top. This meant we had to guess how much of each ingredient to add to each bowlful, and apparently we didn't guess quite right; we ran out of broccoli on the first night while we still had quite a lot of tofu left, and by the time we'd gone through the remaining tofu, we still had about a third of the sauce left. Brian ended up making another small batch of the tofu just to use it up. So in future, he plans to halve the sauce and tofu when making this recipe while keeping the amount of broccoli the same, in the hope that all three components will come out even. There might still be a bit too much sauce, but too much is better than too little.

Flavor-wise, though, Brian's sesame tofu was pretty close to the original: tangy and sweet, with a sesame crunch. In fact, in some ways, it's better, because having the sauce separate means you can toss the broccoli and rice in it, instead of having it all clinging to the tofu chunks. So the entire dish, not just the tofu, is full of that delicious sesame sauce that made the original one of our favorites.

Brian says the dish wasn't very hard to make, either. It does involve several stages—mixing up the marinade, marinating the tofu, making the sauce dredging the tofu, and frying the cubes in batches—but none of them is particularly hard to do. It takes less than an hour in total, which is less time than he puts into some of other favorite meals (like our standard Indian dinner, which involves making parathas by hand). And the recipe has the added bonus of being completely vegan, which is something we like to do whenever we can, even if we're not trying to make it a way of life.

In sum, this Sesame Tofu is a dish we'll definitely be eating more of at home. And when we order out, well, I guess we'll just have to choose a new favorite—or do it even less often.