Silken Tofu Is the Secret
By: Alicia Kennedy
Tags: Food, Life, Vegan, Dessert, Books

Blending silken tofu up in order to create a creamy dessert is one of those things that sounds like only a vegan could love. Tofu, in my dessert? Yes, tofu in everyone’s dessert! It works perfectly, seamlessly every time.

I have long maintained that this is the absolute best, most fool-proof egg replacement in creamy applications. It brings bounce and density, tastes like only what you flavor your mixture with, and it is both cheap and easy, while the end result is incredibly impressive. Silken tofu has historically been my favorite way to make pumpkin pie, but this year I couldn’t find my package, as it was apparently buried in my fridge. Instead, I went with arrowroot starch as my egg replacement and all was well.

Once the silken tofu was retrieved from the chilly depths, though, I wondered what I should do with it, and remembered the recipe for chocolate tofu pudding in Brooks Headley’s 2014 cookbook Fancy Desserts. This was the cookbook inspired by his time as a fine-dining pastry chef, before Superiority Burger became a vegan dream. Veganism and vegetarianism are present throughout the book, though, and with this recipe, Headley fully reaches back into his days as a touring musician with a chocolate tofu pudding dessert inspired by The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook’s heavy-on-the-margarine version that a friend of his used to make as a signature dish.

Headley refines it, though. No one likes the word “refine” when referring to food anymore, but this is a refinement in the most classic sense. Headley simply makes it better. Where the Farm calls for 3 cups of an unspecified tofu, Headley uses silken. Where there are 3 cups of melted margarine in the Farm’s, there’s no fat beyond the melted “bittersweet chocolate (very best quality)” in Fancy Desserts. This results in something smoother and more, well, elegant. Revisiting that recipe led me to other cookbooks on my shelves and many questions for chefs.

That is the tofu pie’s simplicity, adaptability — and yes, its elegance.

Not too long before Fancy Desserts, there was the 2011 Vegan Pie in the Sky installment into the dessert cookbook trio by vegan royalty Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. This was my introduction to creamy vegan pies, where not just silken tofu, but soaked and creamed cashews provided that fatty, creamy base. Here they’re very choosy with where to use tofu, when to use a combination tofu and cashews, and when to forgo tofu for starch and/or agar. It’s such an approachable book, but there’s also such detail in the recipe development. There’s no one size fits all approach to cheesecake here.

Baker Bryn RK tells me that while he was working in Montreal in the early 2000s, the restaurant where he cooked was making a banana-chocolate pie that was incredibly simple: a block of silken tofu, 2 bananas, and 1 teaspoon of vanilla whipped up, then 3 cups of melted chocolate folded in. That is the tofu pie’s simplicity, adaptability — and yes, its elegance. There is a reason it’s been used in cookbooks from the early ’70s to the 2010s: It works!

There are haters, of course, but I wouldn’t listen to them. I would stock up on silken tofu and use it to my heart’s content, for pie from pumpkin to chocolate banana to “blueberry bliss cheesecake” as found in Vegan Pie in the Sky. We all deserve some creamy indulgence, and the vegan way is so quintessentially vegan that it could hurt — if it didn’t taste so good.