My First Encounter with Stinky Tofu!

China, the land of my childhood dreams. The home of Bruce, Kwai Chang, and the fathomless mythical backdrop of my childhood sweetheart, the woman warrior Fa Mu-lan as told by Maxine Hong Kingston.

And home to one of my most favorite dishes: stinky tofu.

It Began Years Ago...

It began nearly 15 years ago. I remember it all too well because it was the very first day I had stepped onto Chinese soil.

I had barely gotten off the plane, checked into the hotel, and then reported to my first day at work in Hong Kong. The day went well enough because I spent most of it being taken around in the office for introductions and well-wishings for success in future cooperation with my new colleagues. I attended a couple meetings, shook some hands, went to lunch, and got set up with a computer. Pleasantly exhausted after this full day, I went home - to the hotel Regal Riverside, where the company put me up temporarily until I could find more permanent digs.

After taking a shower and slipping into some fresh clothes, I took the express to the ground floor, offered a friendly nod to the concierge, and walked out the front doorway. I stepped into the open-air freedom of one city of several in China that were to be my home for the next several years.

Once outside I was immediately assailed by that amalgam of peculiar odors from which Hong Kong - literally translated as "fragrant port" - got its name. I took in a deep breath of this curious air and smiled happily to myself.

I had finally fulfilled my greatest childhood dream - to live in China.

A Nice Walk and Then...

My thoughts for that first evening: to get a tasty Chinese dinner and then go find some adventure. It seems I lucked out at both that evening - all in one go...

Lured by the temperate breezes wafting off the nearby Shing Mun River, I soon found myself meandering along the waterfront walkway. In the distance was the world-famous Jumbo Kingdom Floating Restaurant, and the lights of New Town City glimmered with a promise of good window shopping. I bowed slightly and offered my best nei ho ("how are you") to the elderly citizens walking by - many old Chinese folks love easygoing jaunts with their hands clasped behind their backs, humble scholar-style.

Pewwww-wweee!

Harking originally from the Arizona desert, I marveled at Hong Kong's abundance of beautiful tropical flora. The powerful fragrance of flower-laden trees intermittently punctuated by the scent of enticingly delicious home-cooked meals was utterly...

Oh my god! What the hell is that stench!

Torn viciously away from an otherwise warm and fuzzy reverie, my nostrils were assailed by what was perhaps one of the nastiest smells they had ever seen - uh... smelled! So nasty was this smell that it might make any well-seasoned sanitation engineer think twice about his or her career!

Call it vicious, insipid, even stomach-churning - one thing for sure: that smell was just plain nasty!

Recovery

Despite the horrific blow this maleficent odor had dealt me to my very core, curiosity got the best of me. I wanted to know the source of that earthy stench. I was suspicious of it, and twinged at a subtle level of fear in recognition that this smell could actually have been pleasant in some kind of offhand sick fashion. I filed this random thought away as useless sensory data. Little was I to know that later I was in for an unexpected stroke of tasty pleasure!

After a few moments' to recompose, I struck out afresh to find out the source of that horrible smell!

Adventure!

Granny: A Street Food Vendor

Surprisingly the odor was so strong that I had to walk a long way to find its source...

Following several blocks' worth of brisk footsteps, I came across the culprit: an old Chinese granny. Or rather: an old Chinese granny pushing an ancient smelly wooden cart. I was later to find out that Granny was a so-called "street food vendor".

While in China there are hole-in-the-wall restaurants to choose from, most street food sellers are typically of the cart-pushing variety. They employ all manner of bicycles, tricycles, and small four-wheeled contraptions to carry raw foodstuffs and their cooking equipment, too.

Cooking equipment? Cooking on the street? Yes! But why?

Fresh... FRESH!!!

Chinese folks are absolutely nuts about freshly prepared food. If a buyer was to consider one food seller offering food made a half hour earlier, while fresher food was offered a quarter mile down the street, the unspoken consensus would be that everyone was in for a walk. For that reason, a street food vendor generally cannot sell food that's at best more than a few minutes old.

With this in mind, it's no wonder that a street food vendor like my Granny here are forced to carry whatever cooking equipment and utensils with them - just to be able to serve up fresh food. And ya know what? That's fine with me.

In any case, my Granny was but one member of a seething army of cart-pushing food vendors littering Chinese streets from Hong Kong to Hohhot.

And... uh-oh! She spotted me!

Tough Granny

Granny gestured madly for me to come over. Not to me, but at me. From this moment onward, it was clear that Granny was chugging an attitude.

Unlike many of the people I ran across on the streets of China, Granny didn't look very happy. As I walked up to her, I could see that Life had not dealt Granny a very easy hand. Despite being short, she was stooped with years of hardship, and her face bore the wrinkles of decades spent probably as a poor farmer since her youth. Year upon year under the China's hot tropical sun had furrowed deep wrinkles within her skin, and now her visage was a deeply patinated stone. In shorter words: what some people would call a "hag".

Me? I loved her from the beginning. How can someone not love an old Chinese granny?

"Nei ho" I said in greeting to her. Unimpressed, she merely blinked at me. Her eyes seemed filled with a quiet contempt that spoke of years of suffering. Granny certainly looked tough to me. I decided it best not to say the slightest thing to upset her.

Trying to focus on the positive, I looked away from her and at the contents of her wooden cart.

Granny's Rolling Kitchen

I could see Granny's cart was a veritable rolling kitchen. Top to bottom, it was stocked pans, utensils, a stove, portable gas, a jug of cooking water, cabinets filled with sauces and spices, food containers, and that ever-present cork-capped hot water bottle filled with water for tea, complete with Granny's brew of whole tea leaves floating around in a glass food jar.

At the bottom of Granny's cart was a dirty, scuffed up compressed gas canister, looking ready to explode at any time. Perched precariously above this on a rickety wooden frame was a gas-ring burner upon which rested a gigantic pitch-black wok filled with bubbling oil. This oil was so dark that it was obviously days (perhaps weeks) beyond the normal "freshness limit" most folks are accustomed to in the Western world. Within this seething wok of oil, sizzling squares of food ran amok like nervous rats in the bottom of a barrel. These food chunks produced the rich steaming ether that had assailed my nostrils some ten minutes earlier.

In my clearest spoken Chinese I asked Granny what they were.

"Stinky tofu." she answered in a thick countryside Cantonese accent, hands folded defensively in front of her. (stinky tofu = chou doufu - 臭豆腐).

"Stinky tofu?" I asked, my head tilting inquisitively.

"Of course it's stinky tofu!" she blinked back at me. (Was he nuts? she must have thought.)

"Does it taste good?" I asked.

She nodded severely, her eyes narrowing into suspicious slits.

Granny was starting to get pissed off at all the questions this foreigner was asking her - not knowing it was his first day on Chinese soil, let alone the first time he had ever seen - let alone smell - stinky tofu in the flesh!

I turned to Granny's cart.

Granny's Brand of Stinky Tofu

Next to Granny's steaming wok lay a kind of handcrafted metal grill suspended over a wooden drip pan whose bottom was filled with an accumulation of dark dried drippings so disgusting that I will not describe the sight any further.

Upon this grill lay my new prize: large square-shaped chunks of fried stinky tofu.

Immovable Granny Negotiation

I had heard about stinky tofu. Read about it. But until this day I had never smelled nor tasted it. Its smell had rudely flown up my nose like a mad hornet from several blocks away. And despite that, it had lured me to its sizzling hive of oil.

"How much for one piece?" I asked Granny.

"Seven kuai" she barked while hand signaling the number "seven" to me, a part of common vendor-speak in China.

Despite this being my first day in China proper, previous experience in my ancestral Mexico and in the various Chinatowns of America had taught me never to accept the first proposed price for anything that you were interested in buying. Things were negotiable through bartering. So with this habit ingrained in my mind, I told Granny her price was too expensive and countered with a price with room to grow.

"One kuai," I said.

This pissed her off.

Granny belted off a tirade of unintelligible words in a dialect I had never learned. I cringed at the forceful blast of her tirade, but held my ground. The message was clear: she was unhappy with my counterproposal. In the end she shook her head and gestured the number seven to me once more.

"Seven," I said to her resignedly in Mandarin.

Granny nodded, contempt still flaring viciously in her eyes.

"Okay, I'll take one." I said resignedly.

Capitalism, Granny Style

The smallest change I had in my pocket was a ten-kuai bill. I handed it to Granny. She quickly pocketed the bill, turned to her cart and grabbed a pair of greasy bamboo tongs with which she deftly picked up the oldest and most shriveled slice of fried stinky tofu on the grill. So much for fresh, I thought to myself.

I remember Granny conducting her motions with such dramatic panache, that in thinking about this later, I realized she did this with a purpose: to distract me from the fact that she had refrained from giving me my three kuai in change.

Granny's Impeccable Service

Granny placed the stinky chunk into a carefully torn piece of thin brown wrapping paper and shoved it into my hand. I gasped at the grease already soaking through the paper, but took her offering nevertheless. Granny then gestured brusquely to the sauces waiting on the grill. Instead I chose to study the shriveled square of smelliness in my hand.

It bore the brownish patina of a well-fried food. It was bedecked with tiny flecks of charred food bits which no doubt were the permanent residents of her antiquated cooking grease. These flecks added some flavor and lent to an overall unique experience peculiar to Granny's style of cooking and warm customer service.

What is Stinky Tofu?

I had eaten fried tofu before, and this stuff looked somewhat like it. Where I saw that stinky differed was that the one I held in my hand was filled with a network of blue-greenish "cracks" of indeterminate origin. What these cracks reminded me of was the blue-green mold I had seen growing in European cheeses. It turned out that this guess was correct: later I found out the blue-green content coursing through my tofu patty was indeed mold - the very same mold which gives stinky tofu its especially funky smell. A kind of tofu à la limburger.

Face-to-Face With Mr. Stinky

I was a bit taken aback by how I felt about this square chunk of stinkiness in my hand. From several blocks away the smell was repugnant. Yet up close and personal, I felt as if this smelly monster had been diminished to the quaintly odiferous square that lay in my hand. Having come so far, how could I take offense to something so harmless and small? And, well...cute?

Never having savored stinky tofu before in my life, I struck when the iron was hot. I quickly bit into it and began to chew.

Before I had a chance to allow my taste buds to register anything, Granny was yelling at me again. I remember it as some kind of slow-motion nightmare. Granny's jaw flapped up and down while her raised arm and extended finger violently gesticulated at the sauces on her ancient wooden cart. Not willing to put up with her grumpiness just now, I turned away and continued chewing in earnest to let the flavor soak in.

First Impressions

You know what? This stinky tofu stuff actually tasted pretty damn good!

Despite my first reaction to the smell, my tongue registered a uniquely rich and deep flavor that was - for lack of better words - enchanting. Wonderful!

Just like the fried version of its plain-tofu cousin, the outer crust of this stinker bore a tough springy skin, and was a bit crunchy on the corners. Perfect! On the inside lay a soft, fragrant, whitish tofu meat showing an inner network of mold which had pervaded the square as it sat fermenting for some weeks in Granny's kitchen. This same mold is what gives stinky tofu the "stinky" part of its name.

Embellishments

Okay, it was time to pay attention to Granny and her ranting. All this time she had been pointing at her sauces.

Beside the tofu grill rested several tiny dishes (with proportionately tiny spoons) filled with an array of sauces traditionally served with stinky tofu: soy sauce, chili sauce, dark vinegar, and (later to become my favorite) peanut sauce.

Just looking at the chili appealed to my Latin background, so I spooned up some chili sauce first. Having satisfied Granny's desire to have me try some sauce, she immediately shut up and watched on in momentary silence.

The red chili sauce (usually with seeds) in China is typically not all that spicy hot - at least on a Latino scale. I found it salty, and decidedly its ultimate function was to lend some flavor. Not bad.

I skipped the soy sauce and tried the black vinegar. Tasty! Just to be finicky, I asked Granny where the red vinegar was. "Mo!" ("no have") she answered gloweringly. (Culture Note: For those who have never heard of Chinese red or black vinegar, next time you go to Chinatown, try it. It's usually served with steamed or fried dumplings and delicately shredded ginger. Exquisite!)

As expected, Granny didn't take this well since she risked losing face by not having it. So I dropped the vinegar shenanigans.

Also untried up to this time was the tour de force of all Asian sauces: peanut sauce. Up until that evening, I hadn't tasted peanut sauce either. A double treat! If you don't believe in heaven, after tasting peanut sauce you'll change your mind!

No Regrets... Now Pass Me Some More!

I have to admit. Up until the final precarious moments just before stinky tofu and I were viscerally united, I almost bowed out. Glad I didn't.

With nearly one full square of stinky tofu down the hatch, my thoughts had already turned to the next piece. Once I finished piece #1, I handed the brown wrapper to Granny and pointed to the freshest looking piece on the grill. She paused, and then obliged. After handing another bill over, I was ready to go with some more peanut sauce. Pure heaven.

When done, I complimented Granny on her cooking and told her she could get rich with such good cooking. I guess she liked that comment, since she look a little surprised.

Ever the tough cookie, she abruptly averted her face, grumbled something to herself, and began pushing her cart towards the Shing Mun bridge in search of other buyers...

Granny Finally Softens Up

Although I could have gone elsewhere to get my daily fix of stinky tofu at a better price, I made a point to seek out Granny on the evening sidewalks near the hotel whenever I could.

In time she grew softer in manner, and my original intuition about her latent charm was correct. It was utter joy to hear her laugh. With time, I learned she had indeed grown up as a farmer, had suffered greatly during the Mao years, and had subsisted on a meager pittance until recently, when her body - now broken and in great pain - only allowed her to lean on the cart she pushed as a way to alleviate some of her discomfort.

Granny eventually told me she didn't make the tofu because it was so difficult to prepare. She merely bought it fresh, but did ferment it in her mini-warehouse / kitchen. She also explained her antics about the sauce. She really tried to get people to try the peanut sauce with their stinky tofu because it was her pride and joy: made entirely from scratch with her own hands.

And Now...

After leaving Hong Kong, I moved to Shanghai and traveled all across eastern China. Here I sit in L.A. Chinatown's Taiwan-style Jiang Nan Café, eating some great stinky tofu. Sadly this joint has no peanut sauce.

Sure wish Granny was here to give me some...