No Fried Pork Bladder, No Tofu? | Grandma Kouzi

I. The Caregiver Who Refused All Soy Products

Consequently, our dining table operates under “two systems under one roof”. Following my parents’ habits, there is fish, meat, frying, and stir-frying. Since I don’t eat meat, a separate dish is prepared for me, primarily consisting of greens and tofu, mostly plain and boiled, which is then placed on the table for everyone to share.

Later, the caregiver joined the household. She eats the same food as my parents and is perfectly fine with my choice not to eat meat or overly processed foods—even praising it as “health-preserving”. However, there was one thing she absolutely refused: my tofu.

I only buy fresh, plain soy products; I avoid seasoned dried tofu or bean curd skin, and I certainly don’t buy fried tofu puffs or braised soy products. I am already so careful, so why did she still refuse?

She told me that she used to eat tofu, but ever since her village stopped frying pidu (pork skin puffs), she stopped eating tofu and all other soy products. This left me bewildered—what on earth does frying pidu have to do with eating tofu?

II. How Fried Pidu Ended Up in the Tofu Pot

Although I don’t eat meat or meat products, I find pidu quite palatable. Pork skin is a high-quality source of collagen. While the process involves deep-frying, first, very little residual oil remains on the pidu, and second, it is blanched in boiling water before eating to remove any floating oil, leaving almost no residue.

In small-scale family operations, the oil used to fry pidu is generally home-rendered lard, sourced from various pig slaughtering scraps—bits attached to the skin or clinging to the organs. Essentially, whatever is unsellable and cheap is used to render oil. Lard is a high-quality saturated fat, stable and heat-resistant. Since the temperature required for pidu isn’t very high, I find this process acceptable.

After frying the pidu, this oil becomes a blackened waste product. Where does this black oil go? It is taken home by the tofu makers. Every tofu-making household in the surrounding area needs this blackened oil.

Anyone who has boiled soy milk knows that it tends to foam over—overflowing before it even reaches a boil. Furthermore, you can’t simply turn off the heat the moment it bubbles over, because the soy milk isn’t cooked through; it will have a raw, beany smell. Such soy milk is not only unpleasant to drink but can also cause diarrhoea.

Soybeans contain soy saponins. Saponin molecules contain lipophilic groups and hydrophilic sugar groups, giving them excellent surface activity. They “boil” before the water actually reaches boiling point, producing a large amount of persistent, soap-like foam, as if the pot were filled with hot soapy water—but at this stage, the temperature is not high, only around 70 to 80 degrees Celsius. This is a “false boil”.

Therefore, cooking traditional slow-simmered soy milk requires great care: the pot cannot be full, only half-filled, and someone must stand by it at all times. It starts on high heat, but must be switched to low before the false boil begins, and must be stirred constantly. I once did this job at Sister Black Cat’s home in Pingtung, Taiwan. She required each pot to be boiled for at least twenty minutes, preferably thirty, during which it had to be stirred incessantly with a giant iron spatula.

Pingtung is at the southern tip of Taiwan and is oppressively hot; standing by the pot only added to the heat. I once suspected she didn’t usually boil it for so long and was just taking advantage of me as free labour, so I quietly conducted an experiment: I scooped out a bowl of soy milk after five or six minutes of boiling, and another after a full half hour. After letting them cool and tasting them side-by-side, the half-hour slow-simmered soy milk was indeed tastier, possessing a natural fragrance.

However, most tofu makers use massive pots for hundreds of pounds of soy milk and find stirring to be a nuisance; moreover, the foaming effectively halves the pot’s capacity, wasting labour, time, and fuel.

This is where the village tofu makers call upon the black oil. By adding a spoonful of oil when boiling the soy milk, the pot can be filled almost to the top. The oil film floating on the surface breaks the surface tension of the bubbles, preventing them from foaming over. Once it has boiled thoroughly, the top layer of black oil and foam is skimmed off before the tofu is made.

The caregiver said that in her home village, dozens of households had long been engaged in the business of making pidu and tofu. Some nearby villages were specialised pig-slaughtering villages, collecting pigs from more distant farmhouses to slaughter and sell meat. The villages closer to the city had been prosperous for generations; families from the further countryside were always keen to marry their daughters into these peri-urban villages. Because these places were “leaning against a big tree for shade”, there were small businesses serving the city to be had; as long as one was industrious, they could live a good life.

But now, the pidu business in the village has vanished.

Health inspections by the relevant authorities have wiped out pidu processing. The authorities stated that rendering oil from slaughterhouse scraps was unhygienic, and that having small family workshops with pig skins hanging everywhere, exposed to the wind and sun, was also unhygienic. In short, it was all unsafe and unsanitary. It all sounded reasonable; these justifications were polished and professional, seemingly focused on health and “putting people first”.

With the pidu workshops gone, the supply of black oil scraps disappeared, and the village tofu makers were approached by salesmen from chemical factories. They brought along a “wonderful thing”—defoamers. The composition and principles of defoamers are beyond the scope of this article; I invite readers to research them independently.

Every so often, a tricycle would arrive, unloading crates of defoamer. A sprinkle of this while boiling the soy milk made things far easier than dealing with the black oil; there was no more effort spent skimming off the dark foam. It was light, efficient, and the tofu makers were delighted. But from then on, the carer stopped eating tofu, and all other soy products.

I was aware of defoamers before this, yet I continued to eat tofu and soy products. Firstly, plant protein is a necessity for vegetarians; secondly, I had a habitual, blind trust in processed goods, believing the quality and quantity of defoamers were “manageable and controllable”, much like the COVID-19 virus.

But our carer didn’t see it that way.

“They say black oil is unhygienic, but black oil *has* to be skimmed off. If it’s not cleaned away, the tofu comes out black; you can tell at a glance if there’s any residue. But defoamers are colourless and tasteless. They’re brought in by the truckload and poured into the pots by the ladleful. It all stays in the tofu, the bean curd skins, the tofu shreds, the dried tofu. Eating that is like taking medicine. I wouldn’t eat it even if it were free.”

The carer was stubborn, rejecting everything regardless of the details—a blanket refusal of all soy products born from a single fear. I find this stubbornness quite admirable; it is a form of self-respect and self-care.

IV. We can steer clear of soy products, but can we steer clear of the question of trust?

In this story, the authorities were “putting people first”: to standardise the processing and protect consumer health, small workshops were forbidden from using traditional methods to make *pidu* (pork skin jelly), which also eliminated the black oil. The authorities did their duty, the chemical plants found new customers, and the tofu makers found their work simpler and easier. Everyone thought it was for the best. I don’t eat meat or *pidu*, so the banning of small-scale workshops had no impact on my own table. However, this “people-oriented” decision did affect the tofu and soy products I love.

As vegetarians cannot do without plant protein, but find making tofu from scratch too tedious, I experimented with alternative ways to eat beans. I still eat soy, but I no longer buy processed soy products.

From her, I learned a way to make stir-fried sauce. This has long been a classic recipe of mine, with fans across Taiwan. Originally, I used diced dried tofu in the sauce, but now, having learned a trick from the carer, I use whole soybeans. Her classic method involves frying a spicy sauce with cooked soybeans. Different ingredients lead to different levels of refinement; using soy products laden with the “affectionate” presence of defoamers is far inferior to simply frying the beans themselves.

I made a few tweaks, using soybeans and occasionally chickpeas; each has its own charm. I don’t eat spicy food, so I omit the chillies and only fry with sweet bean sauce. For the sake of texture, I fry the beans separately first to trigger the Maillard reaction; once the skins are fragrant and toasted, I add the seasonings and sauce to fry together.

For the stir-fried sauce, I can use soybeans as a substitute for dried tofu, but another classic in the Kouzi kitchen, “Bean Curd Skin Wheat Rice”, cannot be replaced; I simply have to give it up. From a nutritional standpoint, the impact on a foodie’s protein intake is minimal. Tofu can be made at home, though it requires a vast amount of time, so not eating store-bought tofu or bean curd skins isn’t a major issue. The real problem is that the range of store-bought goods I can accept has shrunk by one more category—and my trust in the outside world has shrunk with it.

V. People-First: But Whose People?

I have been writing this short piece on and off for over a year. I happened to be making final revisions just as James C. Scott, author of *Seeing Like a State*, passed away. Scott wrote extensively about the stories—or disasters—where the state,一心 intent on “doing what’s best for you”, achieved the exact opposite. Legumes are fundamental to human survival; their importance cannot be overstated. Tofu is a magnificent Chinese invention, and from tofu grew an entire ecosystem of soy products and processing industries; the livelihoods in the caregiver’s village are simply an extension of this ecosystem. From the land where soy is grown and pigs are raised to the dining tables of neighbouring households, these small businesses have nurtured many a prosperous home. They are as great and enduring as tofu itself. Sadly, this chain is now broken. What has been severed is not just the livelihood of the farm families making pidu, nor is it merely the presence of soy products on the caregiver’s table.

As a farmer, I grow various beans in Evil Man’s Valley. My level of self-sufficiency is increasing, and I have few concerns regarding my own food safety. As a foodie, I have developed countless ways to prepare different beans, and occasionally, out of sheer restlessness, I find myself worrying about others: who are the people buying and eating these various soy products? Who are the ones ultimately digesting those defoamers? Where do they sit in this “people-first” chain? It is said that fishmongers don’t eat fish, and it is common knowledge that those who make Malatang don’t eat it themselves. I wonder if the people who decided to ban small-workshop pidu, or the officers who enforced that decision on the ground, eat commercially available soy products? And what about those who produce, transport, sell, or use the defoamers, or the people making tofu by the vat—do they eat it?

There is plenty of sophisticated, high-minded “people-first” rhetoric in this world. We don’t always stop to consider how such things actually relate to our lives.

Last year, the relevant authorities introduced a draft food safety regulation that essentially sought to ban farm households from producing dried goods, on the grounds that they were unhygienic and their quality uncontrollable. I don’t eat spicy food, so I almost never buy dried chillies; I occasionally buy a bit of Sichuan peppercorn or star anise, and since I don’t cook many stir-fries, I don’t need much. But my instinctive reaction to this draft was: if this becomes law, I will never buy any dried goods again. It was a visceral response, because I cannot fathom how the pursuit of food safety leads to a causal link where dried goods must be banned.

Later, many people signed petitions to boycott the move, and the draft eventually faded into nothingness. Farmers can still pick and dry their own peppercorns, fennel, and chillies, and I can still buy a small amount every now and then.

I wonder if the people who draft these laws eat tofu? Do they eat fish? Do they order takeaways?

Foodthink Author

Kouzi

Farmer-trekker, village brewmaster. Full-time foodie, part-time farmer, amateur writer.

 

 

 

Unless otherwise stated, all images are provided by the author

Editor: Wang Hao