Tofu Sandwiches

Tofu doesn’t seem to be all that common a filling for sandwiches. In reviewing the menus of several well-regarded vegetarian and vegan restaurants around Chicago, I found plenty of vegetarian sandwiches on offer. None of them, however, featured tofu. Few of them even contained tofu. I was able to find a few on offer in Chicago, and I was able to whip up a few of my own, but I’m not sure that tofu sandwiches are a common enough occurrence to warrant their own category.

Of course, the very first thing I thought of when tofu sandwiches came up on the List, and the thing I was most excited about this month, was the lemongrass tofu banh mi from Nhu Lan in Chicago. Nhu Lan is a Vietnamese bakery that opened in our old neighborhood on the north side not long before we moved down to the south suburbs. It’s the first place I want to go when I’m craving a banh mi sandwich, and even when I make my own banh mi at home, it’s their bread I want to use. One of the best items on their menu–straight up best, not “best vegetarian option”–is their lemongrass tofu banh mi.

It may not seem like much from this angle–a lot of greenery (that’s cilantro, in case you’re one of those unfortunate people like my sister who can’t eat it lest they have flashbacks to getting their mouths washed out with soap as a kid) (this by the way is completely false, my sister never had her mouth washed out with soap) and not much else visible from the top. Once you get inside this sandwich, though, there’s a lot going on.

Like most banh mi, the sandwich is dressed with pickled daikon radish and carrots, along with the aforementioned cilantro stems, thin-sliced hot peppers, and some cucumber. The real star here though is the tofu. Sliced thin, and inundated with a soy and lemongrass marinade, the tofu is firmer than expected, stacked and rolled and gives an overall impression of meatiness, though the texture is not like meat at all.

The other tofu sandwiches I bought this month were also banh mi. These ones are available downtown within walking distance of my office. Slightly less good than the Nhu Lan tofu banh mi, but still pretty great, was the tofu banh mi from Saucy Porka, an Asian/Latin restaurant owned by Amy Le, whom I first met while she was running the DuckNRoll food truck, and whose cuisine I’ve always enjoyed. At Saucy Porka, their tofu banh mi consists of thick, crispy slabs of deep-fried tofu, glazed with one of two sauces, soy ginger or Panang curry.

On this occasion, I chose the soy ginger, and honestly it’s a great sandwich. Texturally, there’s more going on, with a crisp outer skin to the tofu, softened slightly by the syrupy soy ginger sauce, giving way to the softer (though still firm) interior of each brick of tofu. Honestly, I was quite taken with this presentation of tofu.

The other downtown tofu banh mi I tried was from Lotus Banh Mi, an example of the kind of assembly-line, “fast casual” concept that seems to be the flavor of the decade downtown. Choose your platform (soup, noodle bowl, rice bowl, salad, or banh mi), choose your protein (pork, beef, chicken, meatball, or tofu), sauce, other condiments. Scurry back to your office to eat at your desk. They do offer a few “prerolled” options though, named combinations of selected ingredients, of which the Veggiecado sandwich is one.

The Veggiecado banh mi contains tofu, mayonnaise, tomato, avocado, cucumber, pickled daikon radish and carrot, cilantro, and jalapeno slices. On their menu they refer to the tofu as “crispy” but there is not as much care taken with the frying of the tofu as at Saucy Porka, and the tofu is dumped into a steam table bowl after frying to await being ordered. By the time it gets into this sandwich, it is far from crispy.

Still, it is not a bad sandwich! The bread is decent, and there are few (edible) things that you could put into a Vietnamese demibaguette with banh mi fixings and come up with a sandwich that I wouldn’t eat. In this case, the less interesting tofu is helped out by the addition of avocado, and while I don’t think the tomato helped as much, I think it’s not a bad thing to consider adding to other banh mi.

There are other banh mi shops in Chicago offering tofu versions of their classic sandwiches, but I was unable to get to them all this month. Still, I wondered what other ways I could find to sandwich tofu.

DIY

It is November, the month of Thanksgiving, and my first thought was to make a Thanksgiving leftovers sandwich but with Tofurky instead of real turkey. So I went to Whole Foods looking for tofurky. Do you know, the only tofurky-branded anything I found there was a vegan chicken breast product that wasn’t made from tofu at all–it was made from wheat gluten. What I did find were a brick of extra-firm tofu that seemed promising, and two pre-marinated tofu products.

The five-spice braised tofu immediately suggested to me a vegan version of rou jia mo, that most ancient of Chinese sandwiches which we featured on the site about a year ago, featuring intensely flavorful braised pork along with cilantro and other condiments in a Chinese flatbread commonly called bing (or in this case, mo).

I cubed the braised tofu–the insides were still the typical off-white color of tofu, not colored all the way through by the marinade or braising liquid the way the lemongrass tofu at Nhu Lan was–and sauteed it with a little additional five spice, soy sauce, and rice wine. I served this mixture in the mo along with chopped cilantro, ripe serrano peppers, and diced pickled mustard greens.

The tofu doesn’t have the incredible richness of the braised pork belly of a traditional rou jia mo, and shouldn’t be expected to. The tofu is satisfying though, and nicely accented by the spicy serranos and the bright cilantro. Pickled mustard greens, as always, are among the world’s perfect condiments, and become the star of this show.

Perhaps best of all is the bread, crisp and chewy on the outside but soft enough to cradle the sandwich ingredients inside, and more than sturdy enough to contain either the lushness of the braised pork belly or the firmer, dryer, but still tasty cubes of braised tofu.

For the Moroccan style marinated tofu, I acquired some additional ingredients, a spice mix called Ras el Hanout typically used in North African cuisine, and preserved lemons, a definitive Moroccan ingredient.

For this sandwich I baked Moroccan-style Khobz bread, a round loaf typically cut into halves or quarters and commonly used to sop up tajines, Moroccan stews named after the earthenware pots in which they are cooked.

For the filling, I adapted a New York Times tajine recipe for chicken with preserved lemons, substituting the tofu and some chickpeas for the chicken, along with the ras el hanout, chopped parsley, a bit of vegetable stock, onions, garlic, kalamata olives, and the preserved lemons.

I served it in a quarter wedge of the khobz bread, split open to make a pocket, along with some leaf lettuce, Greek yogurt, and thinly-sliced red onion.

This was good, though I found the flavor of the preserved lemon quite foreign and took some time to warm up to it. Regardless, the tofu had a firm, chickeny texture and the ras el hanout was similar to a chaat masala or other Indian-style spice mix, redolent of cumin, cinnamon, coriander. The bread itself was fantastic, and Mindy has extracted a promise from me to make it again soon.

I never did find something to do with the extra-firm tofu, though I have my eye on a few chicken-fried tofu sandwich recipes I’ve seen online. I also considered trying to cure it like a ham, though I suspect that might not go well for the tofu. And I can’t really say that I learned anything, other than that it’s difficult to make a satisfying sandwich with tofu as the featured ingredient. Perhaps that’s why they are so seldom seen on menus. I’m interested in learning more though, so if any Sandwich Tribunal readers out there have a local favorite tofu sandwich please let us know in the comments. We’ll see you in December, with three new sandwiches to explore!