Tofu, broccoli, and noodle stir-fry with ginger

I was wrong about tofu for roughly fifteen years, loudly, and in company.

My position, which I would deliver unprompted at dinner parties, was that tofu tastes of nothing and has the texture of a damp sponge. What I did not know, because nobody had told me, was that both of those statements were entirely true of the tofu I had been eating. I had been buying the soft kind, not draining it, and dropping it into a pan at a temperature best described as warm. Under those conditions tofu is precisely what I said it was. I had been running the experiment badly and then blaming the material.

Two things fix it and neither is subtle. First, buy firm or extra-firm, never silken, and press it: wrap the block in a tea towel, put a chopping board on top, put something heavy on the board, and leave it for twenty minutes while you do something else entirely. A genuinely startling amount of water comes out. Second, get the pan properly hot and then leave the cubes alone. Tofu browns, and browned tofu has a crust, and a crust is a texture. Turning it every thirty seconds because you are anxious is the reason yours has never worked.

Do those two things and it stops being a substitute for anything. It becomes what it has been for two thousand years in the countries that actually eat it, which is a cheap, filling, faintly nutty ingredient that carries whatever sauce you put it in.

The rest is a stir-fry, so the rules are the same as any other: everything chopped before anything is cooked, the pan hotter than feels sensible in a domestic kitchen, and the sauce in at the very end so it coats rather than boils.

Soy, ginger, garlic, a spoonful of maple syrup. Under half an hour, including the pressing.