Buffalo Tofu

I was craving spicy buffalo goodness and found this recipe which I'm very happy with.  Pressing the tofu is really just squishing the water out of it and is a key step for the excellent texture.  I wish I took a pic of the precariously balanced stack of large books I used as weights.  One loud crash, one broken dictionary spine and one hour later I cut the tofu into strips, covered them in 3/4 cup of Frank's Red Hot and put them in the fridge.

I let the tofu sit for about an hour and a half and then assembled the breading ingredients.  It was an new-to-me mixture of breadcrumbs, crackers and flax seed meal.  The recipe calls for Ritz but the ones pictured below are what I used.

And the flax seed meal?  Well, I actually had that on hand!  I'd like to note that this is definitely a new item in my pantry.  I had bought flax seeds to add to oatmeal and at some point I ground a bit into meal for a vegan bread or something.  You're in my world now, flax seeds!






The breading ingredients were whizzed into a finer grain and held nicely to the tofu.

I pan-fried the tofu with a bit of oil and was very happy with it!  Texture and taste really hit the spot.  I also made a vegan ranch dipping sauce which took things to the next level.  This recipe from vegweb.com is easy and makes an impressively ranch-y sauce.  (My mods:  I used just 1/4 cup of soymilk (plain for sure) and 1 tablespoon of red wine vinegar.  I mixed it all together by hand and let it chill in the fridge for an hour or 2 before dinner.)

the sauce doesn't really stand out but it's there between the tofu and celery

My omni dining guests loved the tofu and couldn't get over the ranch.  They exclaimed, 'you made this?!?!'  oh hell yeah.

Next post:  The mac and cheese you see on the plate is from a recipe entitled "Best Vegan Mac and Cheese in the entire world...seriously".  Spoiler alert:  it's not.