Mapo tofu — tofu and minced pork in a spiced sauce with sansho and scallion

Người mới

Shio Mapo Tofu (Salt Mapo, no Doubanjiang) · Ryuji

Name: Shio Mapo Tofu (Salt Mapo, no Doubanjiang) · Ryuji
Total time: 25 min
Yield: 2
Cuisine: Chinese
Ingredients: 小さじ2 (10ml) Sesame oil; 120g Ground pork; 5g Garlic; 5g Ginger; 200cc (200ml) Water; 小さじ1 Soumi Shantan (Chinese stock paste); 小さじ1/3 Salt; 300g Firm tofu (momen); 小さじ1 Salt, for blanching the tofu; 適量 Black pepper; 大さじ1と1/2 (22ml) Sake; 小さじ2 (10ml) Yuzu-kosho; 小さじ2 Potato starch (katakuriko); 1/3本 (40g) Long green onion; 適量 Sesame oil, to finish

Mapo tofu with the chili bean paste taken out and yuzu-kosho put in. The result is pale instead of red, and the heat is bright and citrusy rather than deep and fermented. The tofu is salt-blanched first so it holds together.

Nguồn

Công thức của リュウジ · 📱 Influencer · Ryuji — cooking researcher (料理研究家) and YouTuber behind 料理研究家リュウジのバズレシピ, Japan's biggest cooking channel at ~5.6M subscribers. Known for fast, exactly-measured home recipes.

Tên của các đầu bếp và nhà sáng tạo chỉ xuất hiện để ghi nguồn. More Recipes Please hoạt động độc lập, không liên kết, không được họ chứng thực hay tài trợ.

Ryuji (バズレシピ) — Published by リュウジ on his own YouTube channel as 【塩麻婆豆腐】, under a title that translates roughly as 'honestly, you won't go back to normal mapo — the one that uses that instead of doubanjiang'. The description carries the full ingredient list and his method as text, and that is the source of every quantity here. It is filed under China because mapo tofu is a Sichuan dish, but this is explicitly his variant rather than the classic: the doubanjiang is gone and 小さじ2 of yuzu-kosho — a Japanese fermented paste of green chili, yuzu peel and salt — takes its place, so the finished dish is pale rather than red and the heat is citrusy rather than deep and fermented. The cuisine label here is left as the general 'Chinese' rather than 'Sichuan' for that reason. Two techniques are worth taking away regardless of the flavour: the tofu is blanched in salted water first so it holds its shape, and the starch is slaked in sake with the yuzu-kosho stirred into the same slurry, so the aromatics go in late and barely cook.

Đầu bếp: リュウジ

Watch it being made

リュウジ

⏱ 25 phút🍽 2 khẩu phần🔥 340 kcal🇨🇳 Trung Quốc🌶️🌶️

Không sữa

Các bước

Cut the firm tofu (300 g) into 2 cm cubes.
Bring 1 litre of water to a simmer with 小さじ1 of salt, slide the tofu in and let it blanch gently for 2–3 minutes. Drain it.
💡 This is the step everyone skips and the one that decides whether your mapo has cubes of tofu or a bowl of tofu debris. Salt-blanching firms the surface and drives out water, so the cubes survive being stirred and do not water down the sauce later.
Heat the sesame oil (小さじ2) in a frying pan over medium-high heat and add the ground pork (120 g). Fry 3–4 minutes, breaking it up, until it is browned and the fat has run.
Add the garlic (5 g) and ginger (5 g) and fry 1 minute more, until fragrant.
💡 Aromatics after the meat, not before. Garlic and ginger burn in the time pork needs to brown — going in now, they have the pork fat to fry in and only need a minute.
Pour in the water (200 cc) and add the Soumi Shantan (小さじ1), salt (小さじ1/3), the blanched tofu (300 g) and black pepper. Bring it to a boil.
In a small bowl, mix the sake (大さじ1と1/2), the yuzu-kosho (小さじ2) and the potato starch (小さじ2) into a smooth slurry.
💡 Note he dissolves the starch in sake rather than water, and stirs the yuzu-kosho into the same slurry. That means the yuzu-kosho arrives late, all at once, and barely cooks — which is how its citrus survives. Stir it in early and you boil the aroma off.
Stir the slurry once more so nothing has settled, then pour it into the boiling pan while stirring gently.
Keep it at a boil for about a minute, stirring, until the sauce thickens and turns glossy and clear rather than cloudy.
💡 Potato starch needs to actually boil to set and lose its raw floury taste. If you thicken it off a proper boil, the sauce will thin back out on the plate within a minute.
Stir gently from here on, pushing rather than beating, so the tofu cubes stay whole.
💡 Chinese cooks shake the pan or use the back of a ladle for exactly this reason. A whisking motion will turn 300 g of blanched tofu into scrambled tofu in about four strokes.
Add the chopped long green onion (40 g) and simmer 1 minute more, just until it softens slightly but keeps its colour.
Cut the heat and circle a little sesame oil over the top.
Serve straight away with hot rice, while the sauce is still thick enough to sit on the grains.

💡 Mẹo

Beginner's mistake: skipping the salt-blanch to save 5 minutes. Untreated tofu breaks up under stirring and leaks water into the sauce as it heats, so you end up with tofu crumbs in a thin, watery mapo. The blanch is the difference between cubes and rubble.
No yuzu-kosho? Then you cannot really make this dish — it is not a background seasoning, it is the entire premise, supplying the heat, a good part of the salt and all of the citrus at once. Green chili paste plus a scrape of lime or yuzu zest gets you in the area. Doubanjiang does not: put that in and you have simply made ordinary mapo tofu.
Use momen (firm) tofu, not silken. Silken tofu cannot survive the blanch, let alone the stirring — and this sauce is thin enough that it needs the tofu to hold its shape to read as mapo at all.
This is his variant, not the classic — he removed the doubanjiang on purpose and titles the video around it. If you want the red, numbing, fermented Sichuan original, that is a different recipe; this one is pale, salty-citrus and sharper, and it is meant to be.