No Fried Tofu Skin, So No Tofu Either? | Grandma Kouzi

I. The Carer Who Refuses All Soy Products

So, our family meals run on a “two systems under one roof” arrangement. We prepare dishes according to my parents’ habits: plenty of fish and meat, with fried and stir-fried options. As I don’t eat meat, I make a separate plate, centred on greens and tofu, mostly plainly simmered. Everything still goes on the same table for us to share.

Later, we added the carer to the household. She eats the same meals as my parents, is perfectly fine with my meat-free, minimally processed diet, and even praises it as “good for your health.” Yet there is one thing she strictly refuses: my tofu.

Given that I only buy fresh, unseasoned soy products, avoiding any flavoured pressed tofu or sheets, not to mention fried tofu puffs or braised soy items, I couldn’t understand her refusal. I was already so careful. Why would she still turn them down?

She explained that she used to eat tofu, but ever since her village stopped frying pidu (dried pig skin), she has given up tofu and all soy products. It left me utterly bewildered—what on earth could eating tofu possibly have to do with frying dried pig skin?

II. Frying Dried Pig Skin, Unexpectedly Tied to the Tofu Pot

Even though I don’t eat meat or meat products myself, I’ve always found *pidu* quite enjoyable. Pork skin is an excellent source of collagen. While the frying process does involve oil, very little clings to the finished product. Moreover, it is always blanched in boiling water before eating, which washes away any surface grease, leaving virtually none behind.

In small, family-run operations, the oil used to fry dried pork skin is typically home-rendered lard. It’s made from various slaughterhouse trimmings: the fat left on the skin or clinging to the offal—basically anything cheap and unsaleable, saved up for rendering. Lard is a high-quality saturated fat, stable and heat-resistant. As frying dried pork skin requires only moderate heat, I find this method perfectly acceptable.

Once the pork skin has been fried, the oil turns pitch black and is considered waste. But where does this black oil end up? It finds its way home with the local tofu makers. Every household in the area making tofu relies on this very same dark oil.

Anyone who has boiled soy milk knows it has a habit of boiling over—spilling right out of the pot before it even reaches a full boil. But simply turning off the heat the moment it crests the rim won’t do either. The milk remains uncooked, carrying a raw, pungent bean smell. Such soy milk not only tastes unpleasant but can also upset the stomach.

Soybeans are rich in soy saponins. Because saponin molecules combine lipophilic aglycones with hydrophilic sugar groups, they act as highly effective surfactants. They will “boil” before the water itself, generating copious, long-lasting suds much like a kettle of hot soapy water. Yet the temperature is nowhere near boiling—hovering around seventy or eighty degrees Celsius—making this a “false boil”.

Boiling a proper, long-simmered soy milk takes real care. The pot should never be filled more than halfway, and someone must stand watch at the stove at all times. You begin over a high flame, but the moment the false boil begins, you drop to a low heat. Then comes the constant stirring—only by keeping it moving can you bring it to a genuine boil. I once had the pleasure of doing exactly this at the home of ‘Sister Black Cat’ in Pingdong, Taiwan. She insisted that once the pot came to the boil, it must simmer for at least twenty minutes, though half an hour was ideal, all the while being stirred relentlessly with a massive iron paddle.

Pingdong sits at the very southern tip of Taiwan, where the heat is relentless—standing by the stove meant battling the temperature twice over. I privately wondered if she genuinely boiled it for that long, or whether I was just being put to work because I was free labour. So I conducted a quiet little test: I ladled out a bowl of soy milk five or six minutes after it boiled, and another after the full thirty minutes. Once cooled and tasted side by side, the longer-simmered batch was undeniably better, carrying a rich, natural fragrance all its own.

Yet for the average tofu maker, hauling dozens of kilograms of soy milk around in a massive cauldron makes constant stirring seem like too much bother. Not to mention that keeping the level down forces you to split the batch between two pots, wasting labour, time, and fuel.

This is where the village tofu makers call upon the black oil. A single ladleful added to the soy milk allows the pot to be filled almost to the brim. A thin film of oil floats to the surface, breaking the surface tension of the bubbles and preventing the dreaded boil-over. Once the milk has been thoroughly and properly boiled, the top layer of black oil and foam is simply skimmed off before the tofu-making process begins.

The caregiver explained that dozens of households in her village had long been in the pork rind and tofu trade. Neighbouring villages specialised in pig butchery, sourcing livestock from more remote farming communities and slaughtering and selling meat door-to-door. Villages on the urban fringe have been prosperous for generations. Families from the deeper countryside were always keen to marry their daughters into these communities on the city’s edge. Benefiting from urban proximity, these areas hosted small businesses catering to city dwellers; as long as one was diligent, a comfortable life was within reach.

But now, the pork rind trade in the village has all but vanished.

Sanitation crackdowns by local authorities wiped out pork rind processing. Officials stated that rendering oil from slaughterhouse offal was unhygienic, and that household workshops hanging pig skins out to dry in the sun and wind were equally unsanitary. In short, the practice was unsafe and unclean. The arguments sounded perfectly reasonable. They carried an air of modern sophistication, neatly aligning with health-first and people-centred principles.

With the pork rind workshops gone came the end of the ‘black oil’ by-products. The village’s tofu makers soon found themselves visited by sales representatives from chemical plants. They brought along a “wonder product”—defoamer. The composition and mechanism of defoamers fall outside the scope of this article; readers are welcome to research them at their leisure.

Every now and then, a three-wheeler would come around, dropping off box after box of defoamer. A sprinkle into the boiling soy milk saved a world of hassle compared to the traditional method: no more tedious skimming of the thick, dark foam. It was light work and effort-saving, much to the delight of the tofu makers. But from then on, the caregiver refused to eat tofu or any soy products.

I was already aware of defoamers, yet I continued eating tofu and soy products. On one hand, plant protein is a non-negotiable staple for vegetarians. On the other, there’s a habitual, almost blind trust in familiar processed foods; one tends to assume the quality and dosage of additives are, like the coronavirus, “manageable and under control”.

Our caregiver, however, saw things differently.

“Everyone says the dark foam is unhygienic, but it has to be skimmed off. If you don’t clear it completely, the tofu turns black; any residue is immediately visible. Defoamer, however, is colourless and odourless. It arrives in truckload after truckload, poured ladle by ladle into the pots, and it all remains in the tofu, tofu skin, shredded tofu and dried tofu. Eating this is like taking medicine. Even if they gave it away for free, I wouldn’t dare touch it.”

The caregiver was unyielding, drawing a firm line at everything without distinction. Letting fear of one product colour their view of all soy goods, they refused them all. I find this steadfastness rather admirable—a clear form of self-respect and self-care.

IV. You can sidestep soy products, but can you sidestep trust?

In this story, the relevant authorities claim to be “people-centred”: to standardise production processes and protect consumer health, small workshops are barred from using traditional methods to make crispy pork skin, and the dark foam has been eradicated. The authorities have done their duty, the chemical plant has landed new clients, and tofu makers find their work simpler and easier—everyone seems satisfied. I don’t eat meat or crispy pork skin, so banning small-scale workshops has zero impact on my table. Yet this supposedly “people-centred” decision has a direct bearing on the tofu and soy products I love.

Vegetarians can’t do without plant protein, yet finding it too tedious to make tofu from scratch, I’ve experimented with alternative ways to eat beans. I still eat them, just no longer buy processed soy products.

One of the dishes I learned from the caregiver is a stir-fried sauce. Stir-fried sauce has long been a classic in my kitchen, with devoted followers across Taiwan. Traditionally, I used diced dried tofu. Now, picking up the caregiver’s trick, I go straight for the source: whole soybeans. Her classic method boils the beans before stir-frying them with chilli paste. Different ingredients, a stark difference in philosophy. Using soy products loaded with defoamer is far from ideal compared to the straightforward, no-nonsense approach of stir-frying beans directly.

I’ve made a few tweaks myself, using soybeans and sometimes chickpeas, each bringing its own distinct flavour. Since I don’t eat spicy food, I skip the chilli and stick to just stir-frying sweet bean paste. For better texture, I first dry-toast the beans to trigger the Maillard reaction. Once their skins are toasted and fragrant, I add the seasonings and paste to finish the stir-fry.

For the stir-fried sauce, I can swap dried tofu for soybeans, but another classic from Grandma Kouzi’s kitchen, “tofu skin meifan” (fried rice), is irreplaceable, and I’ve had to reluctantly give it up. Strictly speaking, nutritionally it’s a minor setback for a food lover’s protein intake; tofu can always be made at home, albeit with a massive time investment. So going without tofu and tofu skin isn’t a major issue. The real issue is that my willingness to accept commercially bought food has shrunk once more—and so has my trust in the outside world.

V. People-Centred: But For Whom?

This piece was written off and on for over a year. The final revisions coincided with the passing of Scott, author of *Seeing Like a State*, who recounted numerous tales of governments acting with the best of intentions for their citizens, only to see things go awry. Legumes are vital to human survival, a contribution of immeasurable worth. Tofu is a great Chinese invention, and from it has grown a whole ecosystem of soy products and processing industries. The livelihoods found in the caregiver village are simply an extension of this very ecosystem. From the fields where beans are grown and pigs are fed to the tables of neighbouring households, these small businesses that sustain comfortable, modest families are equally significant and equally steeped in tradition. Sadly, that chain has been broken. What has been severed is not merely the rural trade of making fried pork skin, nor just the soy products on the caregivers’ dining tables.

As a farmer, I grow a variety of beans at Evil Valley. My level of self-sufficiency keeps rising, so I have little cause to worry about my own food safety. As a food enthusiast, I’ve developed countless ways to cook them. Occasionally, with nothing better to do after a hearty meal, I worry myself sick on behalf of others: who are the people buying and consuming these assorted soy products, ultimately digesting those defoamers? Where do they stand in this supposedly ‘people-centred’ chain? They say fishmongers don’t eat fish, and it’s become standard practice for those cooking *malatang* to avoid eating it themselves. I wonder whether the officials who decided to ban small-scale fried pork skin production, or the enforcement officers carrying out those directives on the ground, ever eat commercially sold soy products? What about those who manufacture, distribute, or use defoamers, or the artisans making tofu at the stove—do they eat it?

There are plenty of slick, high-flying versions of ‘putting people first’ out there in the world. How they actually relate to our daily lives is something we don’t always stop to consider.

Last year, the relevant authorities introduced a draft food safety regulation that would essentially ban households from producing dried goods, citing unhygienic conditions and uncontrolled quality. I don’t eat spicy food, so I hardly ever buy dried chillies. I occasionally pick up a small amount of Sichuan peppercorns or other dried spices, but since I don’t stir-fry much, my usage is minimal. My reaction to seeing that draft was simple: if it ever becomes law, I will stop buying dried goods altogether. It was an instinctive response, born of not understanding how banning dried produce could possibly be linked to food safety.

Later, widespread petitions and boycotts led to the draft being quietly dropped. Farmers continue to harvest and dry their own peppercorns, fennel, and chillies, and I still occasionally buy a little.

I wonder whether the lawmakers who draft these regulations ever eat tofu? Or fish? Or order takeaways?

Foodthink Author

Kouzi

A farming trekker and village brewer. Full-time food enthusiast, part-time farmer, and amateur writer.

 

 

 

Unless otherwise credited, all other images are provided by the author.

Editor: Wang Hao