Tofu Scramble

Everyone has their own preferred way of making tofu scramble. In my opinion, a tofu scramble shouldn't attempt to emulate eggs, but it should serve the same purpose -- hearty, proteinaceous, savory, good on breakfast sandwiches. I've recently gotten into making my own tofu, and I saw somewhere the idea of using chickpea flour in a tofu scramble. I have a TON of chickpea flour for some reason, I use the stuff all the time because I love the flavor, so I tried it out and it became my weekly go-to for work breakfast/lunches. The chickpea flour batter coats the tofu, adding flavor and richness, and cooks up basically just like scrambled eggs in the pan.

Tools needed

Just mixing bowls and a nonstick frying pan. A silicone spatula will be very helpful dealing with the batter as it does get sticky.

Ingredients

1 16-oz block of tofu (See note 1)

1 cup chickpea flour, also called besan

1 cup water

Nutritional yeast to taste -- i usually use around 1/4th cup but i don't really measure it

turmeric for color -- 1 tsp should be plenty

salt, pepper, etc, whatever seasoning you like -- i usually use a teaspoon or two of adobo seasoning.

oil for frying (olive oil is fine)

Preparation

Prepare the chickpea flour batter by mixing the chickpea flour, nutritional yeast, and seasonings with 1 cup water. Whisk until you've gotten out as many lumps as possible. Let rest for at least 1 hour, whisking periodically. This step is optional but it helps to ensure the chickpea flour gets fully soaked with the water and it's easier to get rid of lumps this way.

Shred the tofu roughly into a mixing bowl. You can do this however you like but ideally the chunks shouldn't be any larger than bite size. However, since we will be incorporating them into a batter, if the pieces are really small they will end up clumping together in the pan so don't worry too much about that.

Add the batter to the tofu and stir until all the pieces of tofu are well-coated with wet batter.

Heat a small amount of oil on medium-high in a non-stick frying pan.

Add the tofu to the frying pan, scraping out all the batter with a silicone spatula into the pan.

Cook it up. The batter will thicken and brown. Like an omelet, the mixture will harden on the bottom and will need to be sliced and flipped to cook evenly. The tofu is finished when there is no wet batter left in the pan.

Serve. I like it on a tortilla with hot sauce.

Notes

Note 1: Extra firm tofu works best for this in my opinion, softer varieties will turn to mush. Which is fine if you like that! But my goal is to have some amount of large curd-like chunks of tofu. I highly recommend using tofu that has been frozen and thawed for this -- it changes the texture significantly, making it much more toothsome, and it also makes it easy to squeeze all the water out by hand without needing to press. If you want to use a tofu softer than extra-firm, you should DEFINITELY freeze and thaw it first.

-----

back to recipes

back to index