Crispy, Saucy Teriyaki Tofu

Teriyaki anything is one of my go-to takeout orders so today we're making crispy teriyaki tofu that has dozens of five-star reviews and I've been making for over 10 years. The recipe is already pretty short but I'm going to show you how to make it in even less time so that you still get that nice crisp texture and the easiest teriyaki sauce. Okay so the first thing that we're going to do is to press our tofu. As you can see we have a good amount of liquid that's come off of the tofu. I am using super firm, the recipe calls for extra firm. I highly recommend pressing extra firm, you don't have to press super firm. Then you're just getting all that liquid out of your tofu, like look at this shaking out and it's going to just create that space in the tofu to soak up all our marinade. There are a couple different ways that you can like tear up or cube your tofu. I originally used to do this into like little triangles, nothing wrong with that. Now I just prefer tearing it, one it's a lot easier that way and two it just creates a really nice like craggly edge as you can see all around the different tofu pieces. You just get more crisp that way. If you don't have a tofu press you can also use like a cast iron pan, some other heavy pans, some heavy cookbooks and you're just going to wrap your tofu block itself in like a kitchen towel to soak up all of this liquid that you saw and you're just going to let it sit for at least 30 minutes. You really again just want to get that liquid out so that you can do that. I've seen a method about boiling your tofu, I've done it once, I do think it works great as well. That's another way to get that excess liquid out as well. Okay so we have our tofu pieces, now we're going to just do a really nice quick marinade. One of the things I love about tofu is that you can marinate it longer if you want but it really soaks everything up immediately. So we're going to add in some soy sauce. I normally use a light soy sauce here but I actually only had regular which is fine. So I just added a little bit of water to that just so it kept spreading everywhere and then we want to just gently toss all of this together. To our tofu we're now just going to add some garlic powder, sea salt and black pepper. I just do like a pinch of sea salt, I don't like to add too much salt to this recipe. Since soy sauce is salty you do not have to do this, I just don't have fresh black peppers. I should say I only have fresh peppercorns so that's just why I'm grinding it and it's really it tastes amazing, not gonna lie. All right and then we're also going to add our cornstarch. Now cornstarch is going to be our key to that nice crisp tofu and it just really coats everything, gets into all of those craggly edges, all those pieces and it just gives our tofu that crisp that we really want and love. Also conveniently gluten-free so if you're gluten-free as long as you're using soy sauce that is gluten-free this recipe is going to work perfectly for you. Do you like my new glass bowls by the way? My husband got them and I'm already obsessed with them for our videos and now we are just going to cook it. Normally I cook this on the stove top, I put some oil in the pan, crisp this up, we're gonna do it in our air fryer. A lot less time because we're not standing over the stove like you know trying to prep that, we're just putting it straight in and so for that reason I'm actually going to add the oil directly over it. This is just like two teaspoons, you can add more, you can add less, you can cut it out completely, you can do a little oil spray if you want, if you just want a light thing but I want to show you how I would do it to just get the really nice crisp texture. Then you're just going to add your tofu to your air fryer. As I always say don't overcrowd but then I overcrowd in every video anyway but I also feel like once you can get everything in like a single layer you're fine like it's not going to give you any issues and once you make sure to just toss halfway through you're going to end up with really nice crisp tofu that's not sticking together. So we're just going to put this in the air fryer 400 degrees Fahrenheit for about 15 minutes. I'm going to toss it halfway while this is in the air fryer we are going to make our teriyaki sauce. Okay so now we're going to make our teriyaki sauce which is much more of a westernized version of teriyaki sauce not our traditional Japanese sauce which is mirin, sake, sugar and soy sauce or shoyu but this version is closer to what I normally get when I order from a restaurant. So all you're doing is just adding all the ingredients into your pan bring it to a boil then a simmer. I recommend making your cornstarch slurry first it's literally just cornstarch and water you don't want to just be like oh I added in everything and now you're like oh my gosh I just added in cornstarch without making a slurry and now it's clumping all over. So we just blend this out in our bowl to avoid any clumps of cornstarch throughout our sauce. Add in our soy sauce, our sugar, I do normally use brown sugar here but my brown sugar hardened up so I'm using cane sugar, our garlic powder, our ginger and you can definitely use fresh ginger, fresh garlic here just want to show you a really easy version. My alcohol-free version of our mirin is gonna be rice vinegar and you can do water or pineapple juice. I'm doing pineapple juice today it's a bit more again of a westernized version. So now we're also gonna add our cornstarch slurry as well as just some sesame seeds. Gonna start stirring all of this together just making sure that our cornstarch is also not clumping it shouldn't clump anyway but you still just want to stir everything together. We are just gonna let this come to a boil and then we're gonna lower it to a simmer for about four minutes now everybody's low or simmer is different you don't want it to get so unbearably thick that you can't manage it. I'm gonna lower mine to a simmer now and if you're like I want some more sauce feel free to add a little bit more maybe some water a little bit more soy sauce some sugar if you want and you're just gonna let this cool once it's done so that it doesn't affect the crispiness of your tofu. That's always something that I have experienced on my own maybe I've seen like some of you like tell me that if your sauce is too hot it just immediately removes everything you just did to make your tofu crispy so this is kind of like our assurance method. Okay our sauce has cooled as you can see beautiful nice and thick that's like about the thickness you want it and then we're just gonna add in our tofu. Our tofu looks so good and it's so crispy okay we're gonna add this into here again you just want to make sure that your sauce just cools a little bit I really recommend just like how we did a while ago making the sauce while the tofu is cooking so that it's just naturally getting that time you're not adding any extra time to your prep time and then we're just gonna toss ah I'm so hungry and this looks so good you can still really hear that crisp just knocking up against each other because our sauce isn't piping hot and I know I keep saying that I'm just emphasizing it for you so we let our tofu sit and just soak up everything for like two to three minutes and now we are just gonna add some sesame seeds this is for looks mainly but also sesame seeds add a really nice texture change adds a really nice flavor as well and then we're gonna add over our scallion I know that sometimes people want to do greens and not white so I just kind of mix them always but you can definitely just do only the greens here. Okay so our dish is done it looks so good it smells so good and I'm just gonna take a bite for you I've been waiting for this that is so good that's so like all the flavors really come together the tofu is nice and seasoned you get in the crisp everything just works so perfectly I love to pair mine with some just some regular steamed broccoli my mouth is watering it tastes so good oh my gosh some white rice as well you could do brown rice if you don't want to do tofu you could try like chickpeas you could try vegan meat substitutes instead as well you could do tempeh this teriyaki sauce works for so many different purposes it's so good so easy and this dish is just amazing if you want the full recipe you can check the description box jessicankitchen.com you're gonna get step-by-step photos I am so hungry I'm trying to focus to tell you all of this right now but this is so good I really hope that you try it I hope that you loved watching this video let me know in the comment section down below if you're gonna give it a try thanks for watching and I'll see you my next video bye