Spread the curd
In Japan, dried bean curd sheet is a delicacy, but a few restaurants are trying to make it more accessible. Lucinda Cowing and Geoffrey Cain discover there's more than one way to skim a vat
In a workshop a few minutes away from the sprawl of downtown Kyoto, a young man walks up and down aisles of steaming vats filled with a soya milk mixture.
Holding a bamboo rod, he scoops up the film that forms on the top of the soya milk, and hangs the sheets to dry every 10 minutes. He repeats the process for hours, after rising at 2am every day to crush soya beans.
What comes out is one of the world’s most aristocratic health foods. In Hong Kong this is, of course, the cheap daily staple fu pei, used to wrap dim sum. In Japan, the layer that forms over the heated soya milk is called yubaand is a delicacy from the old imperial capital, Kyoto.
The first known records of yuba – in Japanese cookbooks – didn’t appear until the 16th century. Yuba eventually made its way to the tables of the imperial court, where it maintained an aura of elegance and refinement, quite different to its status in China.
For more than 300 years, the ancestors of the shop’s owner, Tomizo Asano, have run the charming little shop, known as Yuba-han, which adjoins her home. Today, the family peddles the same rarefied recipe of yuba as its forefathers did.
In short, it’s a real treat. “You won’t find this kind of yuba anywhere else!” exclaims Asano, the ninth-generation proprietor.