FWIS 2.0

[Gullible Jones]

Funny where a tub of tofu can take you...

I just prepared a simple herb dip, which turned out surprisingly good. The ingredients looked something like this:
- A couple heaping tablespoons each of parsley, oregano, and chives
- A few Tbsp of lite soy sauce (that is for LITE soy sauce, USE LESS for the the full-sodium stuff)
- A few Tbsp of red wine vinegar (or other acid source, lemon juice could work fine depending)
- A couple Tbsp of olive oil
- About four Tbsp of tahini (this is important, more later)
- Three heaping teaspoons of minced garlic (cloves would have been better, oh well)
- A small onion, diced
- A bit of cayenne pepper, mustard powder, ground black pepper, crushed red pepper...
- A slice of pimento (probably unnecessary)
- A quarter cup of plain soy milk (probably detrimental )

I just blended it up and soon had a dip that went pretty well with carrots, though not so well with bread or corn chips. Probably the unusual spicing. I would have used horseradish as the main spice, but I didn't have any...

But anyway, I'm going to generalize this recipe based on what I did. You want:

- One tub of extra-firm tofu
- Whatever vegetables, herbs, and spices you want to flavor it with
- Soy sauce
- Vinegar or lemon juice
- Olive oil
- Tahini

Of thse ingredients the tahini is the most important. The tahini adds fat (albeit mostly unsaturated) for the texture; but mostly it adds umami - a flavor of meat, cheese, and other high protein foods, which tofu happens to mostly lack. With the tahini, this will taste like a dip. Without it, it will taste like tofu. Tahini *should* be available at your local supermarket, if not your local supermarket sucks.

But yeah. You just drain and cube the tofu, throw it and the other ingredients in a food processor (what I related above ought to be a rough guideline for the amounts), and blend until smooth. The result will not be high cuisine, but it's nice for dipping vegetables and crackers in.

Only real current issue is consitency - the dip just isn't very thick, even though it's pretty smooth and creamy texturally. So that may be a problem for certain uses.

Other ingredient ideas:

- Spinach dip! With cooked spinach, onions, garlic maybe? Parmesan or ramano cheese? Not really sure what commercial spinach dips use. I'll have to check the ingredients of one.

- "Pesto" spread with basil and some kind of nut, maybe walnuts? (I'm not a great pine nut fan.) That'd be pretty high calorie though, healthy fat or not. At any rate, not sure if it would work out, I think it might be kind of weird.

- The obvious one, garlic and chive. Just more garlic and more chives, preferably fresh; and less of my other weird assortment.

- Bleu cheese, with actual bleu cheese? That'd probably be good, and maybe a good way to make the standard bleu cheese dip somewhat less fattening.

- Ranch? I don't know what goes into ranch dips, let's Wiki... Okay, apparently it's buttermilk or sour cream, mayo, green onion, and garlic. Green onion and garlic shouldn't be a problem, and oil and vinegar are already there... Maybe yogurt could work instead of sour cream? No reason I see that it couldn't, especially with tahini backing it for mouth feel.

If you've got any other flavoring ideas BTW, feel free to post them, I want to experiment more with this. I figure it may eventually see use at a party, or something.

[mike alexander]

Yoghurt is often worth a try as a sour cream substitute. I make beef stroganoff and chicken paprikash with it.

Yes, it's not as disgustingly good as sour cream, but it's still good.
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[Gullible Jones]

I generally use it wherever one would normally use sour cream. It's not as creamy (duh) but it basically tastes the same, and has the advantage of not causing heartburn and indigestion.

[brite]

Greek yogurt is thicker than regular yogurt and is a fine substitution for sour cream.

Reading your recipe, GJ... you may have to adjust and play a bit with the amount of soy milk, to get the consistency you want. I think you may have used too much, and thinned it a bit too much is all... nothing catastrophic.

The really great thing about cooking... it's a great excuse for playing in your food...
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Didn't you hear? There are no fairy tales in the military. It violates Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

[Gullible Jones]

That's why the generic version I posted indicates no soy milk.

[Gullible Jones]

Argh. I tried to make the ranch version, and failed miserably.

- I way underestimated the amount of vinegar I needed. When I finally had enough, it was far far too thin. Should have used crystalline citric acid... Ah well. Also I ran out of tahini, so I couldn't use extra for thickening.

- It doesn't taste like ranch. At all. Yogurt works fine as a substitute for sour cream, but apparently it doesn't as a substitute for buttermilk.

- Despite the presence of a couple cloves of garlic, a whole diced onion, a bunch of scallions, mustard powder, paprika, and some garlic and onion powder on top of all that, plus soy sauce, vinegar, and lemon juice... It's pretty bland. Scarily bland actually. It doesn't taste like tofu, but it doesn't taste like much else either. Still trying to figure out what went wrong there.

Meanwhile, while I try to figure out exactly where I goofed, we have a whole quart of this stuff, which will go bad if we don't use it.

Fuck!

[gethen]

Tahini is a staple at our house. We use it for hummus, falafel, and other things. We live far from the cities and there's no tahini in our local big box grocery, although the same chain carries it in larger markets, but I found two different brands in the local health food store. Aside from straight tahini, you might like something my daughter-in-law calls tahina. It's tahini with lots of spices that has a slightly different consistency. You mix it half and half with water and it's delicious as a dip, sauce, whatever. Her mother sends us a couple of jars a year because she knows we love it, but I think you probably could find it in a store that sells middle eastern foods. Ask for spicy tahina.
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