Blackened Tofu

Today’s theme was pick a colour.  I’ve chosen Black, for blackened tofu.  

There is a Cajun restaurant no far from me here in Scarborough and while it is not a vegan restaurant, it does have a few really good vegan mains, one of them being blackened tofu.

This is a dish so good that I thought I would try to make it myself.  The first step was to go in search of blackening spice which I am absolutely positive I have seen in stores and it was labelled “Blackening Spice” but I was unsuccessful in my search.

On the net I learned that there is no one recipe for blackening spice, that chefs make up their own mixture and go from there, but that they all have a few things in common: paprika and smoked paprika, cayenne pepper and black pepper, onion powder and garlic powder, oregano and a few other things like chilis etc.  So I bought whichever of those spices I currently didn’t have in stock (and sadly it was a lot of them because I had recently done a purge of my spices) and I mixed everything on a one to one basis with a little extra smoked paprika because I like it so much, and a little less cayenne pepper because I figured it would be wiser to go easy on the cayenne and add more later.  I think I was a little too easy on the cayenne.  I will need to add more to the jar.   I put it all in a mason jar and put on the lid and gave it shake to blend it.

I had a block of tofu left over from the tofu scramble yesterday.  I sliced it into four slices, lightly coated it in canola oil and then dipped in my blackening spice which i had put in a shallow dish. 

I made certain to coat the sides of the tofu as well, and then i put it in a hot frying pan into which i had put a little veggie broth so that the pieces would not stick.

I fried them until they were as black as they were going to get and then served them on a bed of rice with steamed carrots and broccoli florets.   It tasted exactly like the blackened tofu at the restaurant and the only difference was that my tofu pieces were not entirely black like they are at the restaurant.  Nonetheless they were black enough, and it was a great meal - tasty, visually intriguing and well-balanced.  

Now that’s downright vegan!