I visited Taiwan years ago, and one of the street snacks I kept going back to whenever I found myself at the night markets of Shilin and Raohe in Taipei was stinky tofu. If you’ve never had it before, the smell is probably the first thing you’ll notice. It has the distinct ability to make an entire street smell like someone has left something very questionable in a rubbish chute. But somehow, once you actually eat it, all of that disappears. The tofu is crispy on the outside, soft in the middle, deeply savoury, funky and full of umami. Your nose says “absolutely not!”, while your mouth is like “please give me another one!”.
So when I recently came across a video by Muslim food creator Sharmin (@mintydollz on TikTok) making a halal version, I immediately wanted to try making my own. The recipe I found was a much easier home-cooked version that uses firm tofu, fermented white bean curd, garlic, vinegar, salt and water. The white fermented bean curd is particularly important because, apart from being fermented, it already has this slightly sulphuric, funky smell with hints of miso-like umami. I mashed it up with garlic, some of its own brine, vinegar and water, submerged the tofu in the mixture and left the whole thing in an airtight jar in the fridge for a week, flipping it every couple of days so the brine could reach all sides.
One week later, it was time to find out if I had successfully made stinky tofu or just made tofu that had spent a week having a garlic bath.
The smell, surprisingly, wasn’t that bad. It was much more garlicky than stinky, which should probably have been my first clue. I drained the tofu, tossed it with a little baking powder to help make the texture lighter and airier, then fried it until the outside was crispy. And honestly, it looked pretty damn good.
But before eating it, I started wondering what actually makes proper stinky tofu so damn stinky in the first place.
Turns out, the real thing is considerably more involved. Traditional stinky tofu isn’t simply tofu soaked in some funky liquid for a few days. The magic happens in the stinky brine, which is itself fermented. Depending on the producer and region, the brine can be made from things like fermented vegetables, cabbage, bamboo shoots, amaranth and other ingredients, with some traditional versions also incorporating shrimp or other protein-rich ingredients. The mixture is left to ferment for weeks or even months, allowing a complicated community of microorganisms to break down proteins and produce all those wonderfully offensive aromas.
In fact, studies of traditional Taiwanese stinky tofu brines have found a surprisingly diverse mix of bacteria and fungi living in them, while researchers have also tried isolating specific microorganisms to make the fermentation more controlled and consistent. So behind that seemingly simple night-market snack is actually a pretty sophisticated fermentation process.
Which also explains why my little one-week experiment wasn’t quite the same thing.
After frying, my tofu was crispy, airy and had a nice fermented savouriness. It was genuinely good, and for a shortcut version made in the fridge in a week, I can’t complain. But then I took a bite and realised...
This isn’t the stinky tofu I remember ;(
I wanted that aggressive funk. That smell that hits you before you even see the stall. That slightly rotten, almost ammonia-like aroma that makes you question whether you should be eating it, followed by that ridiculously satisfying umami flavour once you actually do. Mine was more like stinky tofu’s well-behaved younger sibling. It had the idea of stinky tofu, but none of the social menace.
Still, I think that’s also what makes this version fun. If you’ve always wanted to try making stinky tofu at home but aren’t quite ready to spend months cultivating a vat of fermented vegetables and microbes in the name of dinner, this is a much more approachable introduction. Just don’t expect it to taste exactly like the stuff you get in Taiwan.
As for me, I think I’ll have to try making the proper version one day.
Although I should probably let the neighbours know first.
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if you wanna try to make other fun kitchen projects which involve fermenting and/or pickling, try these recipes!:
Nem Chua - Vietnamese Fermented Meat
The algorithm gods have brought me to some pretty interesting corners of the internet, including how to make dishes I’ve never even heard of before. One of them was Nem Chua, a Vietnamese fermented meat snack that immediately caught my attention.
Ginger Beer
it’s been weeks since I last talked about my Ginger Bug, so here’s a quick TL;DR: I failed twice and only succeeded on the third try. I guess that’s why they say, third time’s the charm!
