Tofu Adobo

Extremely epic 1 pan adobo for lazy people. 100% vegan. The most prep you’ll do is chopping whatever fresh produce you want to use and mixing a sauce. This has vague old world immigrant ratio descriptions instead of measurements for the wet stuff but I promise it’s easy.

Makes 2-4 portions (I usually serve with rice so it’s hard to say.)

Ingredients

• Soy sauce
• Vinegar
• 1-2 tbsp Sugar
• Fresh tomato and/or ketchup and/or banana ketchup
• 2-3 large bay leaf
• 2 tsp/5 g of black peppercorn (usually whole but ground is fine)
• (Optional) dried or fresh chillies, chopped
• Water
• Ginger

• 1 inch of normal sized fresh ginger, chopped
• ~2 tbsp/29 g of ground ginger

• ~2 tbsp/28mL of vegetable oil (or preferred oil)
• 1 block of silken tofu, sliced into squares
• 1 large yellow onion, chopped
• 3-6 cloves of garlic (up to you)
• (Optional) 4 cups of fresh or par cooked frozen spinach , or your vegetable of choice tbh.

1. Prepare the sauce. You want enough to cover the contents of your pot and then reduce it a bit. Most people tend to suggest 3:1:1, soy sauce, vinegar and water. I tend to do 3:2:1 because vinegar is the best condiment and ingredient. If i had to guess what my soy sauce measurement is, I would put it between ~2-3 tbsp/29-42 mL. Vinegar separates so you can see proportionately how much is in the sauce compared to the soy sauce if you do it second. With meat, you tend to marinade the contents but silken tofu and tofu in general tends to just get mushy so I do not do this. However, life holds many paths. . .
2. Still doing the sauce. I add 1 tbsp sugar and 1 tbsp of ketchup (again guessing), black peppercorn, bay leaf, and then my ground ginger and chillies if I’m using them. If using ketchup solicits any kind of odd reaction from you, you can up the sugar to 2 tbsp and hope you have fresh tomatoes, which you can introduce later. I’m tragically allergic to bananas so I cannot comment, but you could probably also substitute ketchup for banana ketchup here. Give this a stir until well combined.
3. Heat your pan to medium-low heat and add ~2 tbsp of vegetable oil. Add the onion, garlic, and fresh ginger if you’re using it. Heat until fragrant and then lightly browned.
4. Add tofu, spinach, and fresh tomatoes if you’re using it. If you’re using different or additional vegetables, you will probably want to add them before the tofu. I try to lightly fold the tofu so it breaks up as little as possible, but that’s more a plating thing. If it gets blasted into a bunch of chunks, that’s okay.
5. Add the sauce, bring to a simmer, and then let it go covered for at least 20 mins, stirring occasionally. You can cut this part short if you need since tofu doesn’t really benefit that much for simmering for longer periods of time, but I usually squeeze in some reading or laundry here lol.
6. After simmering, taste test and see if you wanna add or correct anything. If not, take the lid off and allow the sauce to reduce to your desired consistency and serve. You could also do a cornstarch slurry if you want to be extra but that’s not what we do here on yeschef.neocities.org.