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Welcome back to "Nihon in
the Kitchen"! This week, I'm going to show you what to do with tofu. Tofu is such a signature
dish for Japanese people, or nowadays you can find various kinds of tofu at local grocery
markets as well. There are different kinds of tofu, or different textures. One is soft,
or you can also get semi-firm or firm kind. What do you usually eat tofu with? You can
make barbecue tofu that you can get at a vegetarian restaurant, but to me it sounds really gross.
How I usually eat tofu in Japan is simply just cut tofu just like so, and put it on
a plate, add some scallions, ginger, and soy sauce over it. This is such a cooling good food for summertime, but it's so simple.
How fun is that? I will show you today how to use tofu in a very different way. I will
make a tofu teriyaki chicken hamburger. First thing that you need to do is use the whole
tofu and break this up into small pieces. You want to use firm tofu for this recipe.
Microwave this for about 2 minutes. That will really extract the moisture from the tofu
and that's what we want. This tofu has a lot of water in it, and making it into a hamburger
patty with too much water in it won't hold together. So we really want to get rid of
water. We take it out of the microwave and then you cool it. It looks like this. It's
pretty dry, right? Put this in a large bowl and add half a pound of ground chicken, one
egg, 1 chopped medium sized onion, half cup of bread crumbs (panko), salt, and pepper.
Mix them together until it is well combined. I've seen people use wooden spoons and spatulas,
but let's use our hands. Okay, now you want to make the mixture into 4 hamburger patties.
I'm going to make pretty large ones. Since I got rid of all of the water contents out
of the tofu, it holds up pretty nicely. Just like so. How easy! Now, you heat a skillet
and pour a little bit of oil. If you put a lid on, it will cook faster. So the teriyaki
glaze is pretty simple. Two tablespoons of sugar, 1 tablespoon of sake, 1.5 tablespoon
or mirin (a boiled down sake and it's a lot sweeter. It almost acts like sugar), and 2
tablespoon of soy sauce. Mix them together and the glaze is done. What's so great about
this is that it's really satisfying. The tofu by itself is sometimes very bland but by mixing
with the ground chicken and flavoring of teriyaki sauce, the whole texture will mimic meat.
So you wouldn't even know that you're eating tofu. Let's pour this sauce. And you want
to close the lid so it cooks through. You want to flip it a couple of times so that
the parry will soak up the teriyaki sauce. And you want to cook it until the teriyaki
sauce thickens a little bit more. Okay, now it's done. So, get a bun and put one of those
guys on top, a piece of lettuce, and I also have shiso (which you see next to your sashimi
at a Japanese restaurant. This is actually very good. Some people call it Japanese Basil.
It's similar to basil but it's a lot more subtle than basil.) Since this is teriyaki
style, it will go really well with the shiso. That's it. You can add other vegetables or
however you'd like it. This is basically it. I will show you what it looks like. Let's
taste it. Hot. Chicken, shiso, teriyaki, tofu. It's a really good way especially if you want
to lose weight or stay healthy, yet you want to have some good burger. You could actually
put a little bit more teriyaki sauce to make it thicker so it soaks more into the patty.
Good stuff. Stay tuned for next episode!