It's time you mastered the dark art of tofu. This noodle dish will help you.
Recently, a colleague confessed to being tofu-challenged. She had tried cooking it years ago and was so disappointed in the results she never tried again. But a stellar dish of crispy tofu in a Laotian restaurant prompted her to want to get back on the horse. So she asked me: What are the secrets?
Tofu is a complex product, with multiple varieties and strategies to match, depending on the dish. But for what she was after, I boiled down my tips to this: Drain and press out as much of the moisture from the tofu as possible so it can soak up the flavors of a good marinade, then coat it in cornstarch and pan-fry it. Or skip the marinade in favor of an after-frying glaze, using hoisin or teriyaki sauce or something like it. Or do both, adding flavor before frying and after.
That same before-and-after approach is what drew me, coincidentally, to a recipe for fried hoisin tofu in Ginny Kay McMeans' new book. The base of the bowl is wonderfully slippery udon noodles, which you bathe in an easy peanut sauce before adding wilted spinach for more nutrients - and color. The hoisin marinade helps the starchy coating stick to the tofu, meaning that with just a few minutes of pan-frying you give its flavor-packed, tender interior a crackly crust.
Now, for the after. Here's where tofu shows its advantage over, say, meat, poultry and fish: With no cooking required to solve any food-safety concerns, you are free to repurpose the leftover hoisin marinade to use as a condiment, tying the elements of the dish together with a sweet-and-salty drizzle.
• Joe Yonan is the Food and Dining editor of The Washington Post and the author of "Eat Your Vegetables: Bold Recipes for the Single Cook."