Vegan Recipe of the Month: Tofu Pancakes with Raspberries

My Recipe of the Month for June isn't entirely in keeping with the original spirit of the challenge, which was to encourage myself to eat more fruits and vegetables. I started out by trying a new fruit or veggie every month, but upon finding that few of these unusual ingredients looked like promising additions to my diet, I decided to switch to trying new recipes with the fruits and veggies I already bought regularly. And starting this year, I decided to impose the restriction that the recipes should be vegan as well, to encourage us along our path of gradually (if not completely) phasing out animal products from our diet.

This pancake recipe, made with tofu in place of eggs, clearly meets the second requirement, but is a little shaky on the first. It calls for fresh raspberries as a topping for the pancakes, but they're not really a primary ingredient. But to be fair, the vegan raspberry fool recipe I presented last week was both fruit-centered and vegan, and the only reason I didn't use it as my Recipe of the Month was that I was already using it for my Gardeners' Holiday post. So technically, I've already met my goal of trying a new vegan recipe that centers on produce this month. Thus, I feel justified in serving up a Recipe of the Month that uses fruit only incidentally. If you still think it's cheating, you can just consider last week's raspberry fool my real Recipe of the Month, and treat this as a bonus recipe instead.

Besides, this recipe happens to serve a particular need Brian and I have had since we started easing off the dairy: finding ways to use up silken tofu. The homemade vegan mozzarella we've been using for the past ten months uses silken tofu as one of its main ingredients, but a batch of the cheese uses only a half-cup of it — roughly one-quarter of a one-pound package — leaving us with about three-quarters of a pound to use up some other way. Brian tried using it in the "Truly Astonishing Tofu Chocolate Mousse" from The Clueless Vegetarian, which is simply a blend of silken tofu and melted chocolate, and while he liked it quite a lot, I found it quite underwhelming. Not only was it too rich for my taste, but I found the slightly beany flavor of the tofu clashed noticeably with the chocolate. So over the past few months, he's been experimenting with various other ways to use it up a bit at a time. On Friday night, he tried blending some up to make a substitute for mayonnaise in our favorite potato salad, and once again, I wasn't terribly impressed; though the resulting salad was certainly edible, it seemed a bit watery, and it lacked the zest of the original. (To be fair, this could be because he also left out the bacon, substituting this mushroom bacon from It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken instead, and neither the flavor nor the texture was really the same.)

I was sure there had to be better uses for extra silken tofu, so I went hunting and found this recipe for "Tofu brekkie pancakes" from BBC Good Food. ("Brekkie" is British for breakfast.) It calls for buckwheat flour, which we didn't have, to make it gluten-free as well as vegan, but I found a nearly identical tofu pancake recipe on another site that used plain old all-purpose flour, so I figured we'd be okay with that. The recipes also differed in their choice of sugar; the BBC used muscovado sugar and the other called for coconut sugar. Not having either ingredient ready to hand, Brian simply used plain white organic sugar instead. Also, the BBC recipe called for a teaspoon and a half of "ground mixed spice" (which we took to mean something along the lines of a pumpkin pie spice), while the other used half a teaspoon of ground cardamom only. Both of these seemed too strong to us, so Brian just left the spice out entirely.

Since this recipe was in British style, using metric measurements for everything over a tablespoon and weights rather than volumes for all dry ingredients, Brian translated it to American before starting. He found that the 349 grams of tofu the recipe calls for (apparently a standard package size in Britain) is equivalent to 12.3 ounces, but he didn't have that much left out of the package he'd already opened, so he used our food scale to weigh out half that amount — just over 6 ounces — for a half-batch, which was equivalent to a full batch of the other recipe I'd found.

The 250 grams of buckwheat flour the recipe called for worked out to about two cups (one cup for a half-batch), and the 400 milliliters of almond milk came out to somewhere around 1.7 cups (around 7/8 cup for a half-batch). However, he ended up not using this entire amount, because the silken tofu we've been using for our faux cheese is apparently more liquid than the "firm silken tofu" the recipe calls for. So he stopped after adding about 5/8 cup for fear of making the batter too watery. And it's probably just as well, since we were using regular rather than unsweetened almond milk, and even that reduced amount ended up making the pancakes slightly sweet.

Cooking the pancakes presented a few additional problems. For one, Brian found that the recipe's cheerful suggestion of "1-2 tbsp extra" of oil for frying the pancakes was, as with most recipes, a serious underestimate. He had to add more oil to the pan repeatedly to keep them from sticking. He also found the window between "not quite done" and "burnt" was narrower for these than it is for most pancakes. He had to keep a very sharp eye on them to get them cooked just right, and a few of them came out just a wee bit dark around the edges.

Despite these minor problems, however, I found the finished pancakes just as tasty as the normal kind made with egg-based batter. The BBC recipe called for them to be topped with raspberries, sliced bananas, and blueberries, but the only one of those we had was raspberries, so I tried some with raspberries and coconut whipped topping, and some with our homemade pancake syrup. Both versions were good, though the raspberries tasted a little bit tart against the sweet pancakes and whipped cream.

Brian thinks that if he makes these again, he might be inclined to replace half or all of the flour with whole-wheat flour to give them a little more body, which might reduce the burning problem. He'd also probably replace the white sugar with light brown sugar, the closest equivalent to the light muscavado sugar the recipe calls for. With both of these changes, the recipe might be good topped with fried apples and walnuts in place of the raspberries — particularly if he adds back in the "mixed spice."

However, even with these changes, this recipe isn't likely to become a regular part of our breakfast repertoire, for the same reason that regular pancakes aren't part of it now: they're too time-consuming and not filling enough. Both my everyday breakfast of whole-wheat toast and cocoa and Brian's morning bowl of granola with extra oats, nuts, and raisins are nearly as tasty, significantly more filling, and much quicker than these pancakes. So we'll most likely save this recipe for special occasions.

Fortunately, in the process of researching it, I also stumbled on another suggestion for using up silken tofu: just scramble it like eggs. BBC Good Food suggests tossing it first with some nutritional yeast, crushed garlic, and turmeric, but the turmeric is most likely just for color and could probably be left out. Scrambled eggs are a regular part of our diet already, particularly as an accompaniment to roasted vegetable dishes like roasted Brussels sprouts and potatoes, and we could happily eat them once a week or more. So it should be simple enough to substitute tofu for them and use up whatever silken tofu we can't process into faux cheese before it goes bad. And as a bonus, we'll be substituting soy for two animal products rather than one. Ever closer to vegan superpowers!