Cold tofu with upripe soybean puree 豆腐の枝豆ソース

The other day, when my wife made chow chow pickles, she used soy beans "edamame" 枝豆 instead of lima beans. Actually she prefers to use young soy beans instead of lima beans when the recipe calls for lima beans. She says that the texture and taste of the soybeans is not a starchy as lima beams. Since we had a leftover pouch of frozen shelled soybeans, I decided to use it up by making two dishes. This is the first one I made. This recipe came from "Otsumami Doujou" おつまみ道場 (in Japanese).



As usual, I did not precisely measure the ingredients but the original recipe (2 servings) calls for;

Edamame: 25grams (boiled, shelled and cooled or in my case, frozen shelled edamame in a microwavable pouch).

Seasonings: White miso (1/2 tbs, I used "saikyou" miso 西京味噌), Cream (1 tsp, I used more), Dashi broth (1 tbs, I used concentrated "white dashi" 白だし from a bottle, about 1 tsp)

I first put all the ingredients in a small food processor and whirred them until they attained a saucy consistency. I did this by adding a bit more cream as needed. The skin of the soybeans did not homogenize completely. So I moved the contents to a Japanese mortal or "suribachi" すり鉢 and tried to make it smoother but it didn’t seem to make a big difference. So the sauce was not as smooth as I had hoped. I tasted it, it had a nice salty nutty flavor from the miso. Since this sauce would be mixed into tofu, I thought the saltiness was just right. You can always "add" more miso or salt to make it saltier to your liking. The ratio of tofu to sauce needed to be taken into account as well. In my case, I was going to serve this with a rather small cube of silken tofu (i.e. more sauce than the original recipe) so I did not add any more miso.

I put this sauce over the cube of cold silken tofu. We mixed well with the tofu before eating but how you eat this is up to you. You could eat it with spoonful of tofu and sauce on the top as well. The cream adds a richness and the miso adds a nutty, slightly sweet and salty flavor. Perfect dish for summer days.