Meatless Mapo Doufu. Traditional mapo tofu calls minced meat (pork or beef) as the main side ingredient to enhance the flavor. Tofu itself is quite plain and tasteless. But comparing and clash make tofu dishes more interesting than other ingredients.

David Malosh for The New York Times. Mapo tofu is a justly popular menu item in many Chinese restaurants. It is a quickly cooked dish of braised tofu with minced pork. You can cook Meatless Mapo Doufu using 13 ingredients and 6 steps. Here is how you achieve that.

Ingredients of Meatless Mapo Doufu

It's 1 block of Silken tofu.
It's 1/2 of packet Enoki mushrooms.
You need 2 of knobs Ginger.
Prepare 1 clove of Garlic.
It's 1 bunch of Green onion.
It's 1 of Sesame oil.
Prepare 200 ml of Water.
You need 4 tsp of Katakuriko.
You need 2 tbsp of ★ Soy sauce.
Prepare 1 tbsp of ★ Miso.
It's 1 tsp of ★ Beet sugar.
It's 1/2 tsp of ★ Doubanjiang.
Prepare 1/2 tsp of ★ Gochujang.

Great recipe for Meatless Mapo Doufu. I made this on a cold day to warm myself up. Indeed, mapo tofu is one of the most famous tofu recipes to have made it out of China. This spicy, delicious dish usually includes small amount of ground pork, but for this vegan version, we use chopped shiitake mushrooms.

Meatless Mapo Doufu step by step

Chop the ginger, garlic, Japanese leek and enoki mushrooms. Cut the tofu into 2-cm cubes. Mix the ingredients marked with ★..
Heat the sesame oil in a frying pan and add the ginger, garlic and Japanese leek. Fry until fragrant..
Season the ingredients in step 2 with the ingredients marked with ★. After the seasonings are mixed well, add the water and tofu. Cook until the tofu is heated through..
Add the katakuriko dissolved in the same amount of water, mix together and serve..
To make cold mapo doufu, don't add the tofu in Step 3, then leave the sauce to cool after thickening. Chill in the fridge and pour over cold tofu..
Variation Instead of tofu, use cooked beans to make mapo beans!.

The result is a vegetarian/vegan dish that hasn't sacrificed a bit of umami! Developing a Vegan Version There's nothing worse for a vegetarian to be in a Chinese restaurant and see a luscious platter of mapo tofu being taken to another table and then when you try and order it, you're told it isn't actually a vegetarian dish. All that glorious tofu and they have to ruin it by throwing in a whole heap of ground meat. Typically, mapo tofu is made with ground pork. In this vegan mapo tofu recipe, I omitted the pork and used a generous amount of fermented bean pastes to give the dish flavor.