I love mapo tofu from a small child and my mother always cooked this at home with her self-made red oil doubanjiang (chili bean paste). This is a vegetarian (vegan) version developed from the traditional mapo tofu recipe.
In recent years, vegan and vegetarian diets have been more and more popular. We got lots of restaurant focusing on vegan dishes. Most of them are quite yummy with very little difference from regular dishes with meats. Among all of this vegan dishes, I love vegan mapo tofu the best. Traditional mapo tofu calls minced meat (pork or beef) as the main side ingredient to enhance the flavor. Tofu itself is quite plain and tasteless. But comparing and clash make tofu dishes more interesting than other ingredients. First you taste some extremely strong flavors, either hot or savory and then followed with the very faint taste from soy beans.
If we skip meat, the dish may seems a little bite plain and that’s why I use shiitake mushroom to replace meat. Shiitake mushroom is one of the key ingredient for vegan stocks because of the large group of amino acid.
Usually mapo tofu is cooked with minced pork or sometimes with beef. I make this vegetarian version so that the vegetarian foods can also enjoy it. However I replace the meat part with chopped shitake mushrooms. Why I have to do that? Here is the story.
It is recorded that there is a couple who own a restaurant mainly selling vegetarian dishes. The wife also the cook gets some pock (麻子in Chinese)on her face. Her tofu dishes are quite popular among the guests. However some guests told her that they want to eat some meat rather than just tofu. So she bought some beef and cut it to granules and adding the beef into her tofu. Then the tofu dish with beef become more popular and her guests gave the name: Mapo tofu.
Cook’s Note
1. For the tofu, I recommend using regular tofu not firm tofu or silken tofu. The taste of firm tofu is not so tenderer but silken tofu is too easy to break. Choose the right type of tofu is a key point here.
2. Blanching tofu in hot boiling water can remove the raw taste of tofu and avoid the cubes from breaking in the later cooking process.
3. When stir-fry the tofu cubes, only back push the cubes otherwise the texture might be broken.
4. Recommend using fresh grilled Sichuan peppercorn powder. I highly recommend using a grinder to grinder the peppercorn, not blending. You can see from the following picture, the white hard parts has no flavors at all,
Steps
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Cut tofu into square cubes (around 2cms). Bring a large amount of water to a boil and then add a pinch of salt. Slide the tofu in and cook for 1 minute. Move out and drain.
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Add oil in wok and fry doubanjiang for 1 minute over slow fire until the oil turns red and then add garlic, scallion white, ginger and fermented black beans to cook for 30 seconds until aroma. Then fry mushrooms until soft.
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Add water to the seasonings and bring to boil over high fire. Gently slide the tofu cubes. Add light soy sauce and sugar.Slow the heat after boiling and then simmer for 6-8 minutes. Then add chopped garlic greens.
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Stir the water starch and then pour half of the mixture to the simmering pot. Wait for around 30 seconds and then pour the other half. You can slightly taste the tofu and add pinch of salt if not salty enough. By the way, if you feel it is too spicy, add some sugar can milder the taste. But be carefully as the broth is very hot at this point.
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Transfer out when almost all the seasonings stick to tofu cubes. Sprinkle Szechuan peppercorn powder (to taste).
- 450 g soft tofu
- 4 middle size shitake mushroom , sliced
- 1.5 tbsp. Doubanjiang ,chopped
- 1/2 tbsp. fermented black beans , chopped
- 2 tbsp. cooking oil
- 2 shallot white , chopped
- 2 cloves garlic , chopped
- 1 inch ginger ,chopped
- 2 tbsp. oil
- 1 tbsp. light soy sauce
- 2 cups water
- 1/4 tsp. sugar
- 1 tsp. sesame oil
- fresh Sichuan peppercorn powder
- 2 tbsp. water
- 1 tbsp. sweet potato starch , or 1.5 tbsp. corn starch
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Slice mushroom, chop garlic, ginger, spring onion white, doubanjiang and fermented black beans.
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Cut tofu into square cubes (around 2cms). Bring a large amount of water to a boil and then add a pinch of salt. Slide the tofu in and cook for 1 minute. Move out and drain.
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Fry doubanjiang for 1 minute over slow fire until the oil turns red and then add garlic, scallion white, ginger and fermented black beans to cook for 30 seconds until aroma. Then fry mushrooms until soft.
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Add water to the seasonings and bring to boil over high fire. Gently slide the tofu cubes. Add light soy sauce and sugar.Slow the heat after boiling and then simmer for 6-8 minutes. Drizzle some sesame oil.
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Stir the water starch and then pour half of the mixture to the simmering pot. Wait for around 30 seconds and then pour the other half. You can slightly taste the tofu and add pinch of salt if not salty enough.
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Transfer out when almost all the seasonings stick to tofu cubes. Sprinkle Szechuan peppercorn powder (to taste).
Turned out great! Thanks for the recipe!
Thanks Lynn.
Hoping you’ll respond…the stores in my area (Ohio, US) sell tofu as either “silken”, “firm” or “extra-firm”. Any suggestions as to how to shop?
Use firm tofu.
This recipe was awesome ! My wife is vegan so it’s often hard to find vegan Asian recipes and I Loooove Asian cuisine. I don’t like mushrooms so I replaced with peas and peppers. Was awesome too. Thank you. I will definitely follow you now!
Sorry I forgot to put my stars! Five stars!
Thank you Jules. Though no rating added, your comment is a so comforting too.
If this is a vegan MoPo why does the description says slide beef in to sauce?
Sorry it is a typo. Should be soy sauce and sugar. Thanks for the correction.
Question: We do not have a grinder, so we pan heat the sichuan peppercorns, sit, and de-husk them to get the little black pellets out. Then use a mortar-pestle to “grind” them. A friend of ours said we could grind the black pellet/seed of the sichuan peppercorn, but with the mortar-pestle, were afraid the pellets would be sandy… Do you have advice about this?
Also, we have has this site bookmarked for months, and we thought this looks like an updated/new version(?). We love it even more!!! The fermented black beans are a great addition!
Aly,
The black seeds don’t have any taste but it spoil the texture. So discard the seeds and use the red skin only!!
A question, please – why is there twice as much sodium in the vegetarian version? The ingredients are mostly the same, including especially the ones with lots of sodium (black beans, doubanjiang). The meat version even has 1/4 tsp salt which is not found in the vegetarian version. If there were salt in the stock, that would once again disfavor the meat version, relatively speaking.
Which number is correct?
Love your site and recipes!
Thank you
That’s a good question really James. Salt is used as a marinated ingredients for the meat to enhance the aroma and flavor. However it is not necessary in this version. Doubanjiang can create enough salty flavor for the stock.
Hi,
I’ve made Mapo Tofu before, but didn’t use fermented black beans. In the past I’ve made black bean sauce by purchasing dried fermented black beans and then prepping them by rinsing off excess salt, then cooking/rehydrating them with water and storing them in oil. I then used a small amount of the rehydrated black bean to make the black bean sauce. Is this what you’re doing with the black beans (or using already prepped black beans in a jar), or are you just chopping up the fermented black beans in their dried state and adding them to the dish?
Thanks you
Ryan
The black beans should be chopped and then add to the soup base. If you don’t love the flavor of fermented black beans, you can also skip it.