This dish bears very little resemblance to what I originally had in mind. I ate at a Thai restaurant a while back and ordered something described as “stuffed tofu.” I remember it being delicious, and I thought stuffing tofu sounded brilliant. It was coated in a delicious tamarind coconut sauce and was filled with some kind of stir-fried veggie mixture. I’ve really wanted to recreate that one and blog it for a while. What I can’t remember is the logistics of stuffing tofu. I didn’t really realize I didn’t know how to stuff tofu until I got started on this. As it turns out, tofu, at least as it’s normally eaten, isn’t that stuffable. It’s not all big and hollow like a squash or pepper. I tried finely mincing and stir-frying some veggies (not the same veggies I ended up with, mind you) and sandwiching them between a couple of tofu slabs. It was spoogerific. I tried cutting neat little holes in the tofu, but the parts I cut out wouldn’t go back in once I’d completed the stuffing process, and I hate to waste tofu. I kind of suspect the Thai restaurant stuffed tofu was made with something on the order of a whole pound of tofu, because that would be easier to work with than a normal serving size of, say, a quarter pound. So my stuffed tofu experiment ended up being a bunch of tofu slabs with holes in them and superfine stir-fried veggies on the side. It tasted pretty darn good though, so I decided to salvage the sauce/veggie/tofu combination in a more practical form. That’s how we ended up here. The sauce is nice and rich, with a little bit of sweet and a lot of tangy tamarindy goodness. I’ll admit, it was a couple of years ago that I had the original dish that inspired this one (maybe that would explain my inability to recall how exactly the tofu was stuffed), so I can’t say for sure if it tastes anything like it. But it’s gooooood. The stir fried veggies are a perfect compliment, and the tofu is delightfully crispy if you do it right. Check out some helpful hits here on how to achieve that.
