Recipe of (Last) Month: Grilled Tofu Skewers

Last month's unusual midyear trip to Indiana caused a bit of a disruption in my blogging schedule. My June Gardeners' Holiday entry was a week late, and I didn't manage to fit in a Recipe of the Month entry at all.

But that doesn't mean I didn't fit in a new recipe. We actually got one on June 30 — just under the wire for the month, but too late for me to blog about it in June. So I'm going to cheat a bit and make this my Recipe of the Month entry for last month, and I'll make a point of fitting one more in before the end of July.

This particular recipe was one that showed up in my weekly newsletter from It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken: Grilled Tofu Skewers. However, we didn't get to it right away because it involved grilling, and we needed to wait for a day when both our schedules and the weather allowed for firing up the grill. And, since the recipe calls for marinating the tofu, we also needed enough lead time for that step.

Aside from that, the dish is simple enough. The marinade has just five ingredients: soy sauce, water, garlic powder, smoked paprika, and agave or maple syrup (though we didn't have either of these, so Brian substituted brown sugar). The tofu has to be pressed and sliced before going into the marinade, but the recipe is very flexible about how long it stays there — anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 days.

The other change Brian made to the dish was to cook it on an actual charcoal grill. The recipe says you can use either a barbecue or a grill pan, as if the only purpose of grilling were to create horizontal char marks, but cooking over charcoal or wood adds a distinct smoky flavor to the other flavors of the dish. Along with the tofu skewers, he cooked up three small zucchini, sliced lengthwise into quarters and marinated briefly in a mixture of soy sauce with onion and garlic powder, and two potatoes, cut into large round disks for quicker cooking. I thought I had taken a picture of this feast as it came off the grill, but I can't find it now on either my camera or my phone, so maybe I failed to engage the shutter. I'll just have to leave it to your imagination to picture the platter, nicely piled with the zucchini, potatoes, and tofu skewers, all cooked to an appetizing light brown.

The one component of the meal not cooked on the grill was the peanut sauce. It was supposed to be a spicy peanut sauce, spiked with Sriracha or another hot sauce, but we didn't have that, and as I'm not a big fan of spicy hot foods anyway, Brian didn't want to buy a bottle just for this recipe. He briefly contemplated adding some of our panang curry sauce, but he decided that probably wasn't the right sort of flavor. So he just combined the other five ingredients, which we always have on hand: coconut milk, natural peanut butter, soy sauce, garlic powder, and lime juice. The resulting sauce was surprisingly thick, too thick to drizzle over the tofu skewers with a spoon, so we had to scoop some out onto our plates and dip the tofu sticks into them. (Our tofu sticks were about one and a half ounces each, and I found two and a half of them to be a satisfying portion.)

In terms of flavor, the tofu itself wasn't that remarkable. Although we'd marinated it for a full day, the pressed tofu hadn't soaked up much of the marinade, so except for the outside, it just tasted like tofu — which is to say, not like much of anything. But the texture was nice and firm, and it made a good vehicle for the peanut sauce, which had a vaguely Thai kind of flavor with its blend of coconut, peanut, and lime. It would have been still more interesting if we'd had some hot sauce to add, and I think it would be worth buying some if we make this again. We could always cut the amount to avoid overpowering my touchy taste buds.

Which brings me to the key question: Are we likely to make this again? My guess is yes. It's a handy, not-too-complicated way to use up extra tofu, which is something we have around fairly often, and it's also a reasonable item to put on the grill that isn't meat or one of the many rather pricey (and mostly not that satisfying) meat substitutes designed for that purpose. The one change we'll probably make to the recipe next time is to make a smaller batch of peanut sauce, since we had quite a lot of it left over. Brian ended up consuming the rest as a dip for pretzels and, when he ran out of pretzels, matza.

And, next time we make it, I'll also try to make sure I get a proper picture of it.