05.01.10

Ji-Mami Tofu Drops

Posted in 3.5 Wasabi Pea Rating, Hard Candy, Sweet at 12:35 am by Boo



What does Tofu really taste like? I mean plain tofu…does it even have a taste of its own? Maybe it’s a taste vampire and sucks up the taste of whatever it is nearest to. Or perhaps you use tofu as a sort of food Styrofoam with which to paint your taste palate on, sort of like how theaters build entire convincing stone archway sets out of carved Styrofoam and textured paint. Tofu confuses me and frightens me just a little (I’m leaning towards the taste vampire theory myself) but seeing them in food drop form got me curious.

Unfortunately, Jimami Tofu is tofu with peanuts so I’m not sure if we will get to know what tofu really tastes like as imagined by the Mad Japanese Food Scientists. I can tell you what peanut tofu in hard candy form tastes like though so get comfy and read on.

I’m not going to link Jimami Tofu because there wasn’t anything definitive on the first Google page and I was too lazy to click to the next ‘o’ in the search. Mostly what came up were a couple recipes to make it, some Flicker pictures and a couple blurbs about eating it; you can do your own Googling if you feel like ferreting out more information. Maybe you might even venture to the third or fourth ‘o’ if you’re feeling zesty. Let me know if the Wikipedia page shows up or not, I was a little surprised to not find a wiki cite on the ‘G’ page. Pretty much all the excerpts agree that Jimami Tofu is tofu with peanuts so I expected the food drop to taste peanutty and maybe something else (what does tofu taste like??!?).

What the food drop actually tasted like is sweet, toasted on the near side of burnt (the still edible but “I wish I had taken it off the fire a couple of seconds earlier” sort of taste) and darkly nutty. I’m not sure I’d go with ‘peanut’ as much as I would ‘Over toasted sesame’. Perhaps the toasted flavor puts me more in mind of sesame than peanut but to me the nutty isn’t quite peanut. It’s close, as sesame is close, but peanut this taste just wasn’t quite. Will that cost the Mad Food Scientists some pea pointage? Hmmm…it wont garner them any, that’s for sure but what they do come up with is kinda tasty in its very toasted sesame sort of way.

As to the tofuness…the food drops aren’t strictly peanutesque and sweet but have a certain roundness to them. Sort of like how a tofu bit soaked in soy sauce tastes of soy sauce and a little extra solidness. It’s not exactly a beany taste from the bean curd of tofu but an extra taste of a block of bland protein which has sucked all the taste of the soy into it. The food drops do indeed have this tofu like quality to them so huzzah Japanese Mad Food Scientists. The only problems are the sweet, which is odd, and the not quite peanutty. I’d say these are a decent Food Drop option but in the great infinite Japanese Snack Food Buffet, I’d go for the Yaki Curry Drops first and then the Jimami Tofu Drops.

Rating of 3.5 Wasabi Peas out of a possible 5.

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