BEST SPICY Mapo Tofu RECIPE From FOOD WARS! Shokugeki no Soma

Hey guys, it's Mike Chen. Welcome to my kitchen. Today we're gonna make one of my favorite dishes of all time. And I thought about this dish when I was watching Food Wars the other day, and I got to the part of the third plate at the Moon Festival Competition. Kuga Teranori's signature dish, the Mapa Tofu. The dish is so nummy and spicy and it hurts you in such a deliciously welcoming way that once you take the first bite, you just can't stop eating. And I'm gonna teach you guys how to make it so you can go try it for yourself, go impress a loved one, your kids, your parents, whoever you want to both punish and treat, this is the dish for you. There's quite a few ingredients, so let me show you what I got here. There's some ingredients that give this dish its unique flavor. First, on the fermented side, we have fermented black soybeans and we have fermented soybean paste. These two ingredients makes this dish so incredibly robust. The flavors are so deep and saturated. I'm drooling just thinking about these two ingredients because these are some of my favorite things to cook with, especially the black fermented beans. That's stir-fried with any vegetable, any meat, you will fall in love. So again, two tablespoons of fermented black beans, two tablespoons of soybean, fermented soybean paste. We have two teaspoons of sugar just to make things a little bit sweeter. A little scallion, garlic, tofu. And when you use tofu, there's a lot of different types of tofus out there. You got firm tofu, you got regular tofu. You need to use silken tofu because the key to this dish, part of it, it's tenderness. Tenderness is a key textural component to this dish. So silken tofu, the softest type of tofu, Chinese hot oil. Okay, if you don't know what this is or how to make it, I have a recipe on this. I'll link it down below. A little bit of cornstarch, Chinese cooking wine, sesame oil, soy sauce, and last but not least, probably the most identifiable flavor to this dish are Chinese peppercorn. Okay, these things are little landmines that you really want to sidestep when you're actually eating the dish. So if you see a piece of these things fall on your fork or your plate, run for dear life, throw it out. Don't ever put this in your mouth and start chewing. Just a quick story. I was eating out with a couple friends who never had this before at a Sichuan restaurant. One of them looks at me while chewing intensely and says, Hey Mike, uh, I don't know why but uh, I think my jaw is turning numb. And uh, so your sense, yeah, you spit that thing out. You do not want your jaw turning numb. You don't want your tongue turning numb. This dish is nummy, but it's not supposed to be that nummy. But this is a key component to this dish. So the flavors of this dish, it's spicy, it's nummy. Like I said, it's also tender and incredibly rich and deep and flavorful. Let's get started. First, before you do any of the cooking, start off on the rice. All right, excuse me while I wash this. Also, all Chinese people need to measure the ratio between rice and water is a finger. While that's cooking in the background, let's prep our ingredients. I got in front of me five cloves of garlic, two scallions. I'm just gonna separate the green part and the white part of the scallions. And then chop those up respectively. The green part, I'm saving for the garnish. And the white part, I'm stir-frying with my garlic. Now, this dish, just like most other Chinese dishes, it's a lot of prep and a whole not a lot of cooking time. So once all the ingredients are prepped and ready to go, everything will go into the wok for just a few minutes and it's all done. So you don't really have a lot of time to kind of go back and fix things. That's why you got to make sure all the ingredients are laid out because this dish will come together quick. Next up, I'm gonna take my fermented black beans and it's really gonna release this flavor nicely when it's chopped up. Like I mentioned before, a key flavor component is the numbness of the Sichuan peppercorns. And we're just gonna kind of break down this flavor in two different ways and also two different textures. We're gonna make some numbing peppercorn oil, and then we're gonna make some peppercorn powder. So you're gonna do, take your wok, turn it on low, heat on low, heat this up a little bit, and I got two teaspoons of peppercorn here. We're gonna take half, so one teaspoon, and we're just gonna toss it down here and roast the peppercorn. And right now as you can see, the peppercorn looks a little reddish. We're gonna roast it till the color changes to brown. And when you roast it, a couple things will happen. One, the flavor will get released more, and two, we'll be able to crush it into a powder easier. There's also a really fun story, a legend behind this dish. It's said that this dish was created by by a widower. Her name was Chen Jiaojiao, and she was a poor lady in ancient China, and so people would come by and give her tofu and bits of minced meat. It was said that she took these two ingredients and made a dish out of it with the peppercorn and with a lot of chilies, and when she had people taste it, people thought it was so amazingly delicious that she said she should sell it. So she started a little restaurant just selling this dish, and because this dish is pieces of tofu with spices all over it, and she also had pockmarks all over her face, so they called this dish Ma Po Dou Fu. Ma Po means old lady with pockmarks all over her face. Not the most nicest dish name, but hey, you know what? I mean, they could have just called it Mr. Chen's spicy numbing tofu. I guess I think that's a little too many words, right? Ma Po Dou Fu. That's how it came about. All right, once the color changes to brown, take it out. I'm just gonna put it into my little spice grater here, and just smash it into powder. Oh, that is smelling even better now. Yeah, baby. All right. That's done. Now we're gonna make a little peppercorn oil, and all we're gonna do with that is pour in about a quarter of a cup of oil. Heat is gonna be on medium-high, and we're just gonna dump in the other teaspoon of peppercorn. And we're gonna fry it again until it changes color to brown, and this should be pretty quick. And you can actually make more of this oil and just keep it on hand to use when cooking because any dish that you want to have a little numbness to it, this oil is perfect for cooking that dish. All right. When you're done, take a little scoopy thing and scoop out the peppercorn and pour the oil into a bowl and set it aside. We're gonna use that a little later. Final prep we got to do. Teaspoon of cornstarch with a teaspoon of water. All right, that's done. Let's prep our tofu. Put it onto a plate and slice it up into cubes. You don't want these cubes to be ultra small, otherwise the tofu might fall apart. After we do that, just like in Food Wars, we're gonna toughen the tofu up a little bit. Otherwise, it's not gonna survive our cooking. And the way to do that, it's just to blanch it with a little bit of salt to kind of just give a little tofu training. When the water boils, couple of teaspoons of salt goes in there, and then we're gonna blanch our tofu. Really softly move it around. About 30 seconds. Afterwards, take it out, put it back on the plate. All right, I think we're ready to cook. Let me go get the beef. This is my favorite part. I feel like at this point, it's like setting a roll of dominoes up and ready to push it over. Looks like everything's in place. Let's get cooking. Heat, medium-high, a little bit of oil. The beef will go in. I'm excited. I'm actually feeling like I'm in the Food Wars right now. You can use about six to eight ounces of beef. I choose eight because I love beef. Cook this till it's brown. And the thing about this recipe is that the salt is really only used when you're blanching the tofu. It's not really needed otherwise because the soy sauce, the fermented bean paste, the fermented soybeans, these things have a lot of salt in them. So we don't really actually need any more salt in addition to that. When the beef is cooked, put in the garlic and scallions on one side. So push the beef onto one side of the pan. The other side, cook your scallions and garlic a little bit, about 30 seconds, and then combine it with the meat. Same thing. Push all that to the side. Add your fermented soybeans and just let that cook on one side of the pan with a little bit of the grease from the meat. And we're doing this just to release the flavor from these ingredients before it joins up with the meat. It's starting to smell so good. At this point of the food war, the judges be like, oh my god, what is that aroma? Except in Japanese. Nothing the smell of fermented black beans when it's being stir-fried. You know, like this ingredient is so majestically beautiful that they actually found this in the tomb of an emperor. From like 2,000 years ago, they found a jar of fermented black beans buried with this emperor. You know, just in case you need to do some cooking in the past life. And honestly, who will blame them? If I die, I'll be buried with this in a can of hot oil. Don't make anything I cook in the afterlife taste good. After this is done, add in your fermented bean paste. Cook that together. Then, a cup of water goes in. Heat this up to boiling, which only take about a minute or so. After that's boiling, heat on medium. In goes the tofu. Be careful here. Treat it very tenderly. Tofu goes in. Two teaspoons of soy sauce. Two teaspoons of cooking wine. One tablespoon, or if you want more, you can do more. Depends on how spicy you want it to be. One tablespoon, or I just added two and a half to three tablespoons of hot oil, and just cook this together. Let it simmer for a few minutes, and let that flavor just get into that tofu. Now, put in your cornstarch and water mixture. Shut off the heat. Just a drizzle of sesame oil. This dish, should be done. Looks so incredible. So incredible. All right, OMG. Finally, a little garnish. Remember that little crushed up peppercorn? Just spread that all over on top for some extra numbness. Scallions, and we're ready to eat. The rice is done. Perfect timing. Perfect bowl of white rice. Chinese finger rice cooking method, never fails. I feel like my apron should be spilling off my body right now, in true Food Wars fashion. Wow, I don't care who I would have been up against, I would have won. It's majestic. Spicy, nummy. The tofu just slips off my tongue like a silky robe at nighttime. And I added enough chili, so this gives me that nice burn, that great sort of food pain that I truly desire. This dish is spicy, it's nummy, it's tender, it's aromatic. It's truly one of the greatest rice companion dishes you can ever make. And this thing is customizable, too. You don't have to add as much meat as I did. If it's not salty enough for you, add some more salt. If it's not spicy enough for you, add some more spice. For me, the ratio that I give you for all the ingredients is perfect for me. So give it a try. For all the ingredients I've listed down below, try this out, and just see why Ikehara has such a difficult time trying to beat this dish. It just feels like all the flavors just teasing my taste buds, and then just punishing them with the spiciness and the numminess that only this dish can bring you. Everything about it, from the different textures to different flavors, this is indeed how addiction happens. Trust me, once you make this dish, and it's not hard to make, it's a lot of prep work, but once you're done, you got this great dish that goes perfect with rice. Everyone who's tasting this is gonna love you. They're gonna adore you. They're gonna hate you a little bit for punishing them with that heat, but at the end of the day, as soon as that irresistible, delicious flavor hits their tongue time and time again, you will be forgiven ten times over. So go try it for yourself, and go win yourself a food war. As always, guys, thank you all so much for watching. Until we cook again, see you later.