Douhua:

Soybeans are an important source of protein in East Asia, and have given rise to a profound and longstanding soybean culture. The beans are ground up into a liquid that is cooked to make soy milk, which with the addition of coagulating agents is turned into curds that are pressed in molds to form blocks of tofu. However, in the form of douhua, a soybean-based sweet treat, it has only recently arrived in Taiwan, when migrants from the Shantou region of China’s Guangdong Province brought it over after World War II. Nonetheless, it has since spread everywhere and developed a Taiwanese style of its own.

Taiwanese have rich memories of douhua, ranging from old-style vendors who ply the streets or set up under trees to the stylishly cultured douhua shops of the social media age.

The tofu pudding of yesteryear

“Douhua, douhua….” Many Taiwanese share memories of hearing the familiar loudspeaker announcing the arrival of vendors selling tofu pudding. Early on douhua makers couldn’t afford to rent stalls in markets, and sold their wares from three-wheeled pedal or motorcycle carts, though many developed loyal followings and eventually founded shops. Whenever Nvidia founder Jensen Huang returns to Taiwan, he invariably eats a bowl of tofu pudding at “Beans Village.” Founded in 1965, its douhua was originally sold from a pushcart, with the shop only opening 20 years ago at Taipei’s Ningxia Night Market. Over time it has developed a wide variety of new products.

These days one rarely sees mobile tofu pudding vendors, though one is still visible in downtown Taichung. Every day Luo Niansheng, owner of the Luo Family Traditional Tofu Pudding business, sells douhua from his three-wheeled motorcycle cart, attracting customers wherever he stops. Besides busily serving tofu pudding, Luo must also answer phone calls from regular purchasers asking, “Where are you?”

In the Instagram era, a new generation of douhua sellers have innovated new products to revitalize the industry, turning tofu pudding into a popular consumer fad. Shops are being designed in unique and elaborate ways. Bai-Shui Douhua, originating in Yilan, features meticulous plating in gold-rimmed ceramic bowls, making their product into the embodiment of a certain kind of lifestyle aesthetic. At Baozai Beancurd in downtown Taipei, the boss serves customers from behind a green terrazzo counter, offering a 1950s throwback feel. Meanwhile, Osmanthus Tofu Pudding in Taichung is packed with toys, figurines, and posters familiar to people born in the 1960s and 1970s.

Dongmen Jiang Ji Douhua in Taipei is a venerable old shop that has been in business for over half a century. The light, delicate old-fashioned flavor of its tofu pudding is part of the collective memory of Taiwanese.

An authentic old-fashioned taste

Dongmen Jiang Ji Douhua in Taipei, which has been in operation for over 50 years, boasts an old-fashioned flavor that has been described as light and delicate. Owner Liao Xiuqing reveals that back in the day her husband traveled all the way to Guanxi Township in Hsinchu County to learn to make tofu pudding. After returning he experimented countless times until he produced douhua with which he himself was satisfied.

Jiang Ji begin making their tofu pudding at three or four in the morning, meticulously executing each step in the process, from selecting, soaking, grinding, and boiling the beans to adding coagulant so that their product becomes firm. To ensure that their customers can eat without safety concerns, they have long used only non-genetically modified soybeans from Canada. These are accompanied by peanuts grown in Southern Taiwan to create the optimal texture of smooth tofu pudding and dense peanuts. They make their own syrup, too, starting with stir-fried sugar which they cook into a thick liquid that they then dilute to make the syrup. Each step in the process aims at producing a satisfying taste. Their addictive product, served without decorative embellishments, has kept customers coming back for generations.

The proliferation of different douhua toppings means that today’s consumers are spoiled for choice. There are also many special local touches to tofu pudding, such as the use of soy milk instead of syrup in Chiayi.

A magical transition

You may be curious about where douhua comes from. In fact, the process of making this food differs little from that for tofu. Both go through stages of bean selection, soaking, grinding, and cooking into soy milk, and they similarly require coagulants to take shape. However, because the end products have different textures, they use different proportions of coagulant, and tofu has to be pressed to squeeze the water out.

The most commonly used coagulant is food-grade gypsum (calcium sulfate), though recently there has been a resurgence in the use of nigari (largely magnesium chloride). Other coagulants include agar and glucono-­delta-­lactone (GDL).

Luo Family Traditional Tofu Pudding still sticks with the traditional approach of using roasted gypsum. Luo Niansheng shows us raw gypsum stones which must be cooked over a charcoal fire and crushed into small pieces, then ground into powder. After that impurities are removed. Roasting gypsum is a maximally time-consuming and labor-intensive process.

A simpler technique is to directly use food-grade gypsum powder, sold by Traditional Chinese Medicine pharmacies, as a coagulant. After the soy milk is brought to a boil in a large pot, a preprepared mixture of gypsum powder and sweet potato starch is blended in, and the pot is left to stand to allow the douhua to set.

Bai-Shui Douhua, on the other hand, uses nigari (a.k.a. bittern) as a coagulant. “You want to know how douhua takes shape? The protein in the soybeans and the minerals in the nigari have both positive and negative ions. When they are heated to a certain temperature, the positive and negative ions engage in a chemical reaction and bind together,” explains Bai-Shui’s founder, Cheng Yi.

This is how food-grade gypsum is used as a coagulant: After soybeans are crushed and cooked into soy milk, a mixture of gypsum powder and sweet potato starch is added to the soy milk pot, which is then left to allow the tofu pudding to set.

Luo Family Traditional Tofu Pudding still sticks with the traditional approach of using roasted gypsum as a coagulant in making douhua.

The ingredients for tofu pudding are simply stated: soybeans, water, and coagulant. But each detail requires careful concentration and perseverance on the part of the maker.

Myriad additional ingredients

As for toppings, many old-established vendors still offer only a single flavor: douhua served with soft peanuts, with the tofu pudding, peanuts, and syrup combined in perfect proportions. But Taiwanese, who are fanatics for variety, have developed a dazzling range of other options for ingredients to accompany douhua, from tapioca balls, mung beans, azuki beans, and Job’s tears to taro balls, taro paste, sweet osmanthus flowers, and sticky rice balls with sweet fillings. It’s hard to choose!

As for the syrup, established douhua shops in Southern Taiwan mainly use a thick syrup. One case in point is Wu Family Kumquat Douhua in Kaohsiung’s Yancheng District. They place two or three slices of douhua in a white porcelain bowl and then add a ladleful of thick syrup, just enough to cover the surface of the tofu pudding, with candied kumquats adding texture and another layer of flavor. In Chiayi, one can see popular douhua shops that don’t use syrup at all, but rather pour on a ladleful of soy milk, which is a comforting, close-to-home pairing.

At Anping Bean Jelly in Tainan, their specialty is lemon douhua. The owner tops the tofu pudding with fresh lemon juice from a small teapot, and the combination of sweet and sour flavors is especially ­refreshing. However, lemon juice cannot be added to douhua topped with soy milk, because the acid in the lemon juice will react chemically with the protein in the soy milk.

Cheng Yi has observed that on Taipei’s Yongkang Street, where there is fierce competition for business from international tourists, Japanese visitors generally enjoy douhua, but Korean travelers, though willing to try new things, are split on it about half and half. This might be because in Korean culture, soybean-based dishes are mainly limited to mapo tofu, and kimchi and tofu stew.

Bai-Shui Douhua invests care and precision in everything from raw materials to the tofu pudding production process to presentation. Each bowl they serve has more to it than meets the eye.

Serving his douhua in gold-rimmed ceramic bowls, Bai-Shui owner Cheng Yi has a traditional “Taiwanese flavor,” based on coriander and peanut powder, that he recommends to foreign visitors

A new era of Taiwanese flavors

Bai-Shui Douhua, which got its start in the hot-springs town of Jiaoxi in Yilan County, has an interesting name that plays on the shapes of Chinese characters. As founder Cheng Yi says, “The shop is called Bai-Shui because when the character for bai [白], meaning ‘white,’ is placed on top of that for shui [水], meaning ‘water,’ the result is the character for quan [泉], meaning ‘spring.’ As the name suggests, Bai-Shui’s tofu pudding is made with spring water.” Since its founding in Yilan six years ago, the business has expanded to Taipei’s Yongkang Street, the National Concert Hall, and the 89th floor of the Taipei 101 building.

Bai-Shui can be said to be the ancestor of today’s “culture-based” douhua shops. Having surfed in Yilan for many years, Cheng Yi had established a strong emotional connection with the county, causing him to seek even deeper links with it. “My thought was not merely to come here to set up a business, but to combine it with local culture to produce value and draw attention to local culture and local food ingredients.”

Water quality is excellent in Yilan, and Cheng has used spring water from the Xueshan Mountain Range to make his tofu pudding. Also, deep-sea water from the Pacific, which is extracted along Taiwan’s East Coast, is rich in magnesium, an essential mineral for human health which can also serve as a coagulant for douhua. As for the toppings on his tofu pudding, Cheng says: “I’m crazy about peanut rolls with ice cream [a traditional Yilan dish], with the taste of coriander combined with peanut powder. Coriander and peanut powder are also used in other Taiwanese foods such as pig’s blood cake and pork belly buns. I did some research and found that this combination is very rare overseas, and can be considered a distinctive Taiwanese flavor.”

Therefore, Cheng cuts peanut maltose candy into thin strips and places them on his douhua, decoratively adds a carefully selected sprig of coriander, tops it all off with amber colored syrup, and serves it in a gold-rimmed ceramic bowl. “Sugar is an important medium because it enable the flavors of the tofu pudding and accompanying ingredients to blend together. We use authentic Tainan cane sugar, which I think is the only genuinely Taiwanese sweetener.”

Bai-Shui Douhua can be considered the pioneer of today’s trendy, culture-inspired tofu pudding shops.

Not as simple as it looks

The ingredients of douhua seem simple enough: soybeans, water, and coagulant. But there are many unspoken secrets behind the bowls of tofu pudding that are served to customers. We arrive early in the morning at the work area of Bai-Shui Douhua and find Cheng Yi taking the lid off of soybeans that have been soaking overnight. The water is incredibly clear. “We use running water to wash and soak the beans, and that rinses away the impurities.” He also uses imported non-genetically modified soybeans. “Just as various flavors of coffee are made by blending different coffee beans, at Bai-Shui we blend different varieties of soybeans to produce our tofu pudding.”

“We want to make something simple with nothing added, but that’s not as easy as it sounds.” For example, he says, when soy milk is being boiled, it releases saponins, producing a lot of bubbles. If you don’t boil them away, the beans will have an unpleasant beany flavor. Most businesses add a defoaming agent to save time, but Cheng simply simmers the soy milk for longer and pays special attention to controlling the heat.

Workers fully cook the soy milk one day in advance and then place it in a refrigerator for rapid cooling. The next morning they directly add nigari and slowly reheat the mixture to make it set. “If we used soymilk made on the day, the temperature would be different each time, so the proteins would be unstable, making the quality of the resulting douhua uneven.” Cheng figured out that by cooling the soy milk to about 0°C, the proteins are stabilized and the nigari can be safely added the next day.

Each bowl of tofu pudding demands the careful concentration and perseverance of its maker. Douhua injects a gentle, honest, yet unforgettable taste into daily life in Taiwan, while also exhibiting the creativity and meticulous attention to detail of Taiwanese cuisine—making it a potential key to understanding Taiwanese culture: not as simple as it first appears.

Tofu pudding vendors aim to provide “a mouthful of douhua, a heart full of satisfaction.” This food exhibits the creativity and meticulous attention to detail of Taiwanese cuisine.