Hold the Tofurky. JACOB ADELMAN looks for lunch at the Los Angeles Tofu Festival in an asap podcast.
Where gorging is good for you. (AP Photo/Jacob Adelman)
The vegetarian version of the hot dog eating contest. (AP Photo/Jacob Adelman)
In Asia, where tofu has been eaten for centuries, bean curd dishes abound. There's sundubu: a peppery Korean stew of tofu with beef, pork or shrimp that's served still simmering in a stone pot. There's China's mapo tofu: bean curd sauteed with ground meat and dusted with Szechwan pepper. In Japan, there's hiyayako: cold tofu with ginger, scallion, fish flakes and a splash of soy sauce.
But at last weekend's Los Angeles Tofu Festival in that city's Little Tokyo section, such perennial favorites were hard to find. Visitors working up an appetite viewing the festival's cooking demonstrations and tofu eating contest had to settle for the likes of tofu hot dogs and tofu tacos.
Americans have "started eating more tofu because they know it's healthy," said Miyuki Nagano, who works for the U.S subsidiary of Japanese tofu maker House Foods Corporation. "But they use it a little different way from Asian cooking."
In this podcast, a tofu purist goes looking for something to eat at the festival and finds an answer to one of our age's most vexing questions: "What's up with 'Tofurky'?"
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asap contributor Jacob Adelman is an AP reporter in Los Angeles.
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Check out Adelman's inside look at the sumo wrestler's diet
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