Plant-based how-to : Tofunaise

It’s fresh, tart and silky.
Here is a light plant-based sauce, resembling mayonnaise.

Silky tofu, that you buy or make yourself.
It’s the base.

Sudachi citrus as a flavor.

Recipe :

A :
1/2 cup silky tofu
B :
1/4 ts hot mustard
1/8 ts turmeric for color (optional)
juice of a sudachi lime (or 1/3 lime, or other citrus)
salt, pepper to taste

Poach the tofu in hot water 2 minutes or cook in microwave, let water out. When it’s cooled, add in a blender with other ingredients listed as B.
Keep refrigerated up to a week. If the texture has changed, you just need to stir it with a spoon a little before using.

Rem : you can replace up to 2/3 of the tofu by more olive oil to get a fatter mayo closer to the classic version. That depends on your goal, it will still be vegan. I do it mostly to get a lighter sauce so I have oil just enough for flavoring.

Golden sweet potato waffles

Simple waffles with 2 yellow twists.

You can see these bits in them. They are cubes of baked sweet potato.

Kurikogane potato (more here)

The second ray of sunlight is a generous teaspoon of turmeric in the batter. Mix. Heat the waffle-maker. Cook. Prepare coffee.

Sesame black sugar mousse is luscious

Schluuuuurrrrpppppp…
Mmmm. Sorry it’s over, there is none left ! Make yours it’s quick and you need only 3 ingredients.

That’s extremely simple. In a mill, process the sesame into paste, or use paste you already have (tahini, nerigoma).

Mix it to silky tofu (about 2 tbs of paste per cup) and a little kurozato black cane sugar. Whip well. Add a few drops of vanilla essence and a little brandy for flavoring (optional).

Transfer into cups.

Mix some more sugar and water, stir till it gets a black syrup texture.
Pour half of the syrup on top, and refrigerate at least one hour.

The syrup went down around the cream, so pour the rest just before serving.

Crème de sakura (sakura an)

桜餡sakura an is the girlie version of anko, the classic sweet bean paste used to make Japanese sweets.

It is traditionally flavored with pickled sakura.

Dried daifuku mame. They are big white beans, very convenient to make Japanese sweets.

After soaking and cooking.

1. Paste the beans.
2. Add color (beni koji for red) and syrup or sugar. I also add a little brandy.
3. Pass the paste through a sieve.
4. Add pickled minced sakura leaves (for strong taste) and/or flowers (for lighter taste and pink bits in the mass).
5. Let a few hours, so the paste takes the full flavor.

The pickled sakura must be rinsed and soaked, otherwise they are really too salty.

That’s the finished paste. It can be used in sweets and breads.

With the rest of paste that didn’t pass the filtering, and some leftover of anko bean paste, I made a toast.

Wagashi Saga : Japanese sweet posts and tutorials.

Recipes using sakura-an :
sakura mochi
double sakura waffles
sakura anpan

Calling the Spring with a green tempura

Japanese tempura would be related to Christian Lent. That sound weird but it seems the dish appeared when the Portuguese Jesuits visited the reclusive Japan of 16th century and brought many new things. The habit of frying food in batter is one of them. Particularly, the missionaries would do donuts for the Carnival preceding tempora (Lent in kitchen Latin), so the Japanese associated fried food and the word tempora, tempura~whatever and it became tempura. Maybe.

Greens. Fresh herbs and veggies.

Fried into tempura.
It’s totally plant-based as it’s a simple eggless tempura batter. The batter is flour, ice cold water and tempura baking powder that I bought. It is like ordinary BP with turmeric added for the color.

tempura tutorial