Handmade Milk Tofu Really Does Taste Better – It’s No Rip-Off!
If you have ever travelled through the Inner Mongolian grasslands, you are unlikely to be unfamiliar with steaming bowls of salty milk tea or the distinctive dairy specialities of the Mongolian people. Last summer, during a fieldwork trip to Senggendalai Town in Zhenglan Banner, Xilin Gol League, the local herding families invariably welcomed me with these very delicacies.
At first, I found it hard to accept the peculiar fermented aroma of the dairy foods. But after a month, milk tea became a part of every meal, dairy snacks became indispensable, and these foods turned out to be the very key through which I came to understand the changes sweeping across the pastoral region.
Since 2018, the Inner Mongolian government has rolled out its “Dairy Revitalisation” policy, with Xilin Gol League actively promoting the dairy product industry and offering substantial support to traditional dairy-food makers. Yet despite this push, producers still face numerous difficulties. Many small-scale makers have been unable to benefit from the programme and are gradually leaving the trade.
Why? In the herders’ eyes, the causes lie in the replacement of traditional equipment by machines, the loss of ancestral craft skills and ever more stringent food-safety regulations — consequences, above all, of the long-term decline of traditional grassland pastoralism.
I. Dairy Food Production as Local Knowledge
Like every skilled craftsperson, herders who excel at making dairy foods may be unable to state the exact duration of fermentation, the precise heat at which whey should be drawn off, or the timing and force required for stirring. Yet through years of daily, repetitive labour, they have acquired a deeply practical, experiential knowledge — as Xinjile, who is twenty-eight this year, has done.
Xinjile grew up surrounded by the craft of dairy-making and, after graduating from university, followed in his father’s footsteps to run a dairy-food business.
He says there is no fixed recipe for dairy foods; it all comes down to how the work is going that day and the quality of the fresh milk. If milk left over from making milk tofu yesterday has fermented naturally overnight, he simply mixes in a little fresh milk today and carries on.
The critical step that transforms curds into milk tofu is what the makers call “pulling strands” — heating and stirring the milk mixture until it takes on the texture of bread dough, becoming supple, pliable and stretchy enough to pull into threads.
One day, Xinjile found that no matter how long he heated his raw milk curds, the mixture simply would not pull. The sour whey that had separated was being reabsorbed by the curds even under vigorous folding. He judged the problem to be too much fat in the milk, so he scooped out half the mixture and added a whole bucket of semi-drained raw milk curds that had been kept frozen. This time he stirred far more carefully, pressing and kneading with his hands every so often, and the milk tofu set quickly.
Subu, another dairy-food maker, adds fresh milk to her raw milk curds to keep the output consistent: “I watch the milk — if it won’t pull, or if the texture feels wrong to the touch, I add a little milk to help it ‘stick’ together.”
Most producers are confident that, as long as the milk is of good quality, making dairy food is unlikely to fail. They trust that experience and craft skill, combined with subtle adjustments, will keep the product consistent.
That very flexibility also gives rise to a wide variety of fermented flavours: Subu’s milk tofu has a golden surface and a rich, mellow taste, while Xinjile’s is pleasantly chewy and, when heated, melts and pulls into strands.
II. Standardised Production: Can You Have Quality and Quantity?
At the same time, the government has been vigorously encouraging small workshops to upgrade to standardised facilities. A converted workshop must include six basic areas — a changing-and-disinfection room, a milk-purification workshop, a fermentation workshop, and so on — use electric processing equipment, and replace all production tools with food-grade plastic or stainless-steel utensils.
Gerile, in her mid-forties, has been running a dairy-food business in Senggendalai for over twenty years and has watched the local dairy-food industry grow from nothing and transform from old ways to new. For her, automated machinery has indeed freed her from the most gruelling labour, and her production scale has risen dramatically.
Before 2020, Gerile had used her back room as a workshop, making milk tofu by hand with a wood-fired stove, a large iron pot, wooden stirring paddles and wooden moulds — a full hour of hand-stirring yielded barely five kilograms of milk tofu.
In 2020, encouraged by government policy, Gerile opened a dairy-food processing workshop, investing in automated machinery. Raw milk now travels through a refrigerated mixing tank and piped conveyors to the production hall. The fermentation workshop has its temperature regulated by air conditioning to ensure a stable fermentation process, yielding at least fifteen kilograms of finished milk tofu per hour.
Yet despite the rise in output, Gerile always feels that machine-made dairy food falls a little short: “Everything is done in a sealed room with the air conditioning on, and the cream that comes out simply has no rich fragrance.”
Unlike fermentation in an air-conditioned facility, traditional fermentation requires milk to be exposed to the air — fresh milk is left untreated to react with the microorganisms in the surrounding environment. After twelve to seventy-two hours of natural fermentation, the milk turns to yoghurt, and the separated fat and whey are further processed into dairy foods. In Gerile’s view, that deep, rich aroma depends very much on whether the fermentation can draw on the natural microbial flora in the environment.
“Once you start using machines, the technique changes, and so does everything about the craft of making dairy at home – the taste simply cannot be the same,” Gerile worries. “As mechanisation increases further, the traditional culture of dairy-food making will slowly disappear.”
The equipment used in standardised workshops also brings about subtle changes in flavour.
Traditional dairy-making tools – made of wood – are hand-selected and hand-crafted by the herders themselves. The milk-tofu moulds, engraved with decorative patterns and Mongolian characters, are particularly beautiful. Wood is not only pleasing to the eye; it also absorbs lactose and gives dairy foods a “secondary fermentation”. In many regions, wooden barrels remain the only proper vessel for fermenting yoghurt and churning butter.
The herders have been rather critical of this requirement. Natural fermentation, after all, is a product of an open environment; heavily sterilised utensils sever their organic connection with the food, and dairy foods gradually become items on an assembly line, stripped of their distinctive flavour and cultural significance.
III. Upgraded and Modernised – Now What?
Although the local government has introduced various incentive policies, in practice only producers who have already built up a certain amount of capital can qualify for the preferential treatment offered under the Dairy Revitalisation programme and can afford to mechanise their production and upgrade to standardised facilities.
At present, Senggendalai has three standardised workshops; more than ten other dairy-food shops are still home-based craft workshops. Most of these small family operations simply cannot bear the cost of scaling up production.
Subu, who runs a dairy-food shop in Zhenglan Banner, is blunt: she cannot afford machines and cannot afford to hire labourers, so her production scale has to stay where it is.
By the end of 2022, Master Lü, who had been running his dairy-food shop for seven years, even closed his business: “Dairy food keeps getting more expensive to make, but business keeps getting harder. So many people are switching to machines now. They buy milk from big farms, every batch comes with a quality-inspection report, they produce in bulk, their distribution network is wide – how can we possibly compete with them?”
A few operators who have managed to keep pace with the standardisation requirements had previously worked in other professions and had saved up some capital.
Converting her home-based craft workshop into a standardised small workshop cost Gerile 600,000 yuan – and that figure covers only the hardware: each electric heated mixing boiler cost around 20,000 yuan, each heated centrifuge and each electric grilling rack for dried milk skin about 10,000 yuan, and the fit-out of the 600-square-metre workshop cost roughly 500,000 yuan. For most herders teetering on the edge of poverty, this is close to an astronomical sum.
Mechanised production does not just mean a hefty capital outlay; it also challenges the herders’ understanding of what makes a good dairy food.
In the herders’ view, the quality of the milk is the fundamental determinant of the quality of the final product. “Only dairy food made from local milk has that flavour. Local cattle produce milk with a high fat content; the milk tofu you get from it has a layer of golden fat on the outside – that’s what makes it truly good.”
They are not wrong. Mongolian Yellow Cattle spend most of the year grazing freely on the grassland. Their lactation cycle is long, the milk is of excellent quality and rich in concentration, and the dairy foods made from it are correspondingly high in fat.
Milk flavour shifts with the breed of the cow, the composition of the feed and the changing seasons, and the herders harbour a natural distrust of intensive dairy farms: “The grass that cows on the outside farms eat is not the same as what our local cattle graze on; the milk they squeeze out has a grassy, off-putting smell, and it gives the dairy food a strange taste.”
In their eyes, the change in the source milk used by standardised workshops is nothing short of devastating for the quality of the final product.
IV. From Fresh Milk to Dairy Food: A Story from the Past
Such a possibility did once exist. In fact, from 2001 onwards, Zhenglan Banner – the banner in which Senggendalai Town is located – implemented an ecological relocation programme accompanied by a dairy-village construction plan, encouraging relocated herders to give up their original Mongolian Yellow Cattle and switch, on a whole-village basis, to raising Holstein dairy cattle.
Although imported Holstein dairy cattle cost far more than beef cattle and were more demanding to care for, the government in the early stages actively provided herders with subsidised loans, built fodder and feed bases, recruited large-scale dairy enterprises, and established milk collection stations in each gacha (village). For a time the local dairy-farming ecosystem thrived, and herders’ lives became increasingly intertwined with it.
Take Taban Od Gacha in Senggendalai as an example: around 2007, the average household kept ten to twenty dairy cows; the collection price for milk was stable at 1 to 1.2 yuan per jin (approximately 0.5 kg); at the time, keeping dairy cows was said to bring a herding household several dozen yuan per day – about the same as a day’s wages for casual labour outside the village.
Then, after the melamine-tainted milk-powder scandal of 2008, regulation of raw-milk quality was tightened overnight, and the dairy market contracted rapidly. The large dairy enterprises, themselves badly damaged, moved directly into the raw-milk market, setting up corporate-owned farms and seizing bargaining power through measures such as absorbing individual herders. As the milk collection stations withdrew, the herders’ milk lost its traditional market entirely, and herders were cut off from an important source of income.
At the same time, the knock-on effects of the 1980s dual household contract system for grassland and livestock began to surface in herders’ livelihoods.
Once grassland parcels and livestock were contracted out to individual households, the traditional collective mode of production in the pastoral areas shifted from “nomadic herding” to “settled herding”: each household fenced off its own plot, grazed it at its own expense, and bore its own losses. Since the 1990s, despite ecological protection policies such as returning farmland to grassland, grazing bans and pasture rest periods, and grassland–livestock balance regulations, problems such as grassland degradation have remained stubbornly visible.
When the vast majority of Senggendalai’s grassland fell under grazing-ban and pasture-rest periods, the per capita grassland available to herders shrank to just over 200 mu (roughly 13 hectares) – far too little to sustain free-range grazing. Herders gradually turned to fenced enclosure feeding, with households penning their livestock for an average of more than half the year. This meant a sharp rise in both labour input and feed costs.
For herders who have moved to urban areas for work, densely packed housing is unsuitable for keeping livestock, let alone for making dairy foods at home.
The women who remained in the pastoral areas and dairy villages are growing older. They now milk their animals each day solely for their own household’s consumption, and rarely sell any milk to dairy-food workshops. They, too, have gradually given up the back-breaking labour of making dairy foods, and their need for shop-bought dairy products is ever more pressing. It all sounds rather ironic.
V. Epilogue
The introduction of official production standards has indeed improved hygiene conditions in dairy-food manufacturing. But ever more stringent regulation is at odds with traditional dairy-making knowledge. Producers are compelled to revise the “old ways” to meet regulatory requirements – how, then, can they still make the authentic, delicious dairy foods that herders cherish?
If things continue as they are, it will only become harder to change a landscape in which commercial dairy products squeeze out traditional ones, large branded dairy enterprises squeeze out individual producers, and those with capital squeeze out those without. Amid raw-milk market volatility and the machinations of dairy-industry capital, the Dairy Revitalisation programme presses triumphantly ahead, while small-scale producers are left unable to share in its rewards.
In a Douyin video, Gerile has launched an appeal, urging regulators to introduce policies and measures suited to traditional dairy-food workshops.
I believe that, alongside scale and standardisation, respecting local knowledge rooted in ethnic communities, and deliberately partnering with the natural environment and its microorganisms, could be one possible path out of the real-world predicament facing traditional dairy foods.
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Disclaimer
All personal names in this article are pseudonyms
Unless otherwise noted, all photographs were taken by the author
Editor: Ze’en