Cooking with Mum: Red Tofu Braised Chicken

Here is my favourite everyday recipe for red tofu braised chicken. It's made out of a very hard to stomach fermented bean curd mixture, which has an extreme alcoholic pungency and eye watering taste. Considering the mild taste of every other soy product, fermented bean curd tastes like a roundhouse kick to the face. Once cooked however it turns extremely mild and makes a wonderful sauce. If you like blue cheese, you'd probably like this stuff.

Don't worry about this stuff going off, the longer it lives, the more delicious the flavour, I've had a jar for three years that was absolutely delicious. Just keep it in the fridge with the lid firmly screwed on, upside down to prevent mould growth.

With the vague proportions for the sauce, I recommend start small, maybe 4-6 cubes and half a cup of water. Once you start to dissolve the sauce down, you can thin or thicken it up as much as you want. I normally use 10-12 cubes and a cup of water, since I love the sauce on rice.The bean curd we use, normally comes with chilli added, so we don't add any extra.

Red Tofu Braised Chicken

Vague Ingredients:
1-2 tablespoons of sugar for the caraml
1/2 onion, finely diced
2-3 cloves of garlic, finely minced
500g chicken
Fermented bean curd
1/2-1 cup of water
Sugar
Chopped red chilli

1. Heat up a pot on a steady medium, splash in a tablespoon of oil and once that has heated up, throw in some sugar.

Creating the caramel, essential to thit ko

2. Continue to stir rapidly up the colour changes to a shade of caramel you find agreeable.

Woah! Action shots!

A little bit darker than this

3. Take off the heat immediately and stir in the garlic and onion, stir briskly for about a minute or two, until they have begun to soften and smell fragrant.

Go go go!

4. Throw in the chicken and cook until no paleness shows.
5. Throw in the sugar, as much bean curd as you can stand and the water. The more sauce you want, the more water and bean curd you should put. Add in a little of the liquid that the bean curd was preserved in as well for extra flavour.

So much bean curd

Give it a mush

6. Put on a lid and allow to simmer for 20-30 minutes, until the chicken has cooked through. Taste at this point and add extra bean curd, if you want a stronger taste, or more sugar if you need to balance out the flavours more.