In Gukou Village, Gaoping City, there is a temple courtyard named "Skeleton Temple" because it looks like a skeleton. "Skull Temple" is the only temple in China to commemorate the soldiers killed in the Warring States Period. The most authentic place to make tofu in Gaoping is Gukou Village, where every household makes tofu.
Tofu is the first ingredient for cooking tofu. The soybean used to make tofu is Gaoping local soybean. The quality of tofu production is directly related to the taste of cooked tofu. Rural people go to bed early, around 9 o'clock every night. Before going to bed, they will soak the local specialty soybeans in a bucket to make them swell.
At 0: 30 in the morning, I got up and made a fire to boil water. While boiling water, grind the pre-soaked soybeans into slurry with an electric mill and put them in a bucket. Then pour the raw soybean milk into a big vat, wait for the water in the pot to boil, and then pour all the boiling water into the vat full of raw soybean milk.
Then, the raw soybean milk in the jar was filtered on the gauze bucket frame with the filter made by ourselves. Squeeze the soybean milk into the basin below with chicken legs. Fresh milky raw soybean milk was filled in a whole basin, and finally only some "waste residue" was left in the gauze.
The seasoning for cooking tofu comes from these "waste residues". Mix these waste residues with ginger and garlic, and add some salt, which is the ingredients for eating tofu.
Then put the raw soybean milk in the basin into the pot to cook. What comes out at this time is the soybean milk we usually drink.
Pour the soybean milk back into the jar, and then order the tofu with the pre-mixed gypsum. It is a very magical process to order tofu with gypsum powder. Under the catalysis of gypsum powder, soybean milk slowly turns a jar full of soybean milk into tofu flower, which is the tofu brain we usually drink at this time.
Finally, pour these tofu into the homemade wooden mold for precipitation. Leave it for about three hours, and these loose tofu will become a whole piece of white and tender tofu.
At eleven o'clock in the morning, the tofu that has been suppressed for three and a half hours has turned into pieces of tofu. At this time, it really entered the stage of baking tofu.
Take the tofu out of the mold, cut it into small pieces 3 cm thick and 6 cm square, and arrange it neatly on the bamboo board. Charcoal fire is the best fire for baking tofu. Put the iron frame on the charcoal fire, and then evenly stack each cut tofu block on the iron frame. When baking, you need to turn each piece of tofu upside down until each piece of tofu is baked golden brown.
Like a small manual workshop, you can bake up to 300 pieces of tofu every day, and the price adds up to 50 cents.
Roasted tofu is a very popular local specialty food, which has a deep mass base in Gaoping. Whether rich or poor, old or young, women or children, office workers or passers-by, as long as they pass by the tofu stall, they will stop and spend a few minutes tasting some tofu.