11/25/2022 0 Comments Is cook serve delicious 2 local coop“When you eat our tofu, it has a flavor to it, as opposed to being very watery or bland or gritty,” Amey says. The tofu is then cut and packaged for sale. The curds are placed into forming trays and pressed to remove excess water. Once nigari is added, the protein and oil from the soybeans clump together to form curds, leaving behind a watery whey, which is drained off. “It’s basically seawater, without the salt - chemically it’s magnesium chloride, but it has all the elements and nutrients from the seawater.” “It’s the purest form you can get,” Amey says. Amey sources the nigari from Japan, where it’s a by-product of removing salt from seawater. Once the okara is removed, a natural coagulant called nigari is added. “We’ve always felt like it was important to close that organic loop, to reduce waste,” Amey says. The leftover slurry, or okara as it’s called in Japan, is discarded, in this case going to local dairy farmers who use it to feed their herds. The beans are soaked and ground, then spun to extract the liquid. They source organic soybeans from small-scale farmers in upstate New York, the same farmers they’ve been buying from since the company started. At every possible point, he says, they make choices that improve the taste and texture of the tofu. “This is by far the best product that I’ve found, and it’s more comparable to what I find in Taiwan than anything else.”Īmey says their product is modeled after a Japanese-style medium-firm tofu, which is meant to be an all-purpose product. “In Taiwan, people make their own tofu or buy it fresh from local markets,” Ni explains. Judy Ni, the chef-owner of Baology, says Fresh Tofu is the only tofu she’ll buy. Their support indicates to him that he’s making a high-quality product. Amey says selling to chefs, who have the highest expectations for the product, is one of his favorite elements of the business. It’s sold in grocery stores, served in university dining halls, and distributed wholesale to restaurants across the region. What began as a two-person operation supplying only restaurants is now housed in a production facility in Allentown, employing more than 20 people and turning out as much as 5,000 pounds of tofu a day. “It wasn’t like it is today, but people were getting into it.”Īmey started working at Fresh Tofu soon after the company was founded, and in 2018 bought it from the previous owners. “When started in 1984, we thought the health food movement was taking off,” Amey said. After 27 years in the tofu business, Mark Amey knows the current interest in wellness is nothing new.
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