Vegetarian Reuben

from Jamey W. Bennett
to Daniel Larkin

Dude,
Did you once tell me that you make a vegetarian reuben?
Jamey 

from Daniel Larkin
to me 

Funny enough, I cut tofu this morning and started marinating it for ruebens tonight. Jenny’s parents are coming over for it!

I use my homemade kraut, so it’s basically the shit.  Plus, the marinade mimics slow smoked, salty beef fairly well.  It’s obviously a different flavor from a standard cornedbeef reuben, but I like the tofu just as much as any cornedbeef rueben I’ve ever had.  

The process is pretty simple.  I cut the tofu into thin slices, maybe about 1/4-inch thick, and marinate it in my special sauce (ewww) for at least 4 hours.  My sauce is **roughly** a mix of 2 parts soy sauce, 1 part worcestershire sauce, and a few slashes of liquid hickory smoke.  Then I dilute that all with water until I’m comfortable that it’s flavorful, but not overly salty.

When it’s done marinating, I cook the tofu in safflower oil on high heat until it’s brown on both sides.  I’ve found that this gives the best texture.  High heat and safflower oil.

Then I just stack it on some grilled pumpernickel bread with a heaping pile of warm sauerkraut, swiss cheese and thousand island dressing (you’ll probably do Russian dressing).

Yum.  I’m glad I was already planning on having these tonight, otherwise I would be scrambling to make it happen after writing this.

from: Jamey W. Bennett
to Daniel Larkin

That sounds great! I’ve been craving a Reuben, and we’re in the countdown to Orthodox Lent, so we just waved a 56 day goodbye to meat on Sunday. On top of that, I have a big bag of kraut in the fridge…I may hit up Whole Foods for some tofu in a bit.

Thanks!

[Update: Turns out we already posted about this in October. We’re idiots! http://twodudesfoods.com/post/11693303786/tofu-rueben] 

Tofu Rueben

Daniel Larkin to jameyshow details 10:16 AM (1 minute ago)

I’m not going to lie to you, Jamey, last night I made the best tofu rueben I’ve ever eaten.  This normally wouldn’t sound like a big deal except that an all vegetarian restaurant in Knoxville named Veg-O-Rama used to make a tofu rueben that would knock my socks off – that is until they closed shop.  Anyway, I think I beat their rueben!

Another reason this is big news is that after living with a vegetarian for 7 years, I think I finally figured out how to make good tofu.  I’m sure you’ve cooked enough tofu to know that it’s a blank slate of a food item texturally and flavor-wise, and it requires some seemingly magical skill to make progress on either front.

 Marinating is obviously necessary, but there’s always the problem of sloppy loose texture – even when you use “extra firm” curd.  There is one brand of local organic tofu we buy sometimes that’s thick as a steak, but what’s good for the texture is bad for flavor, since the denseness impedes rapid marination.  (And who wants to marinate tofu all day?)

So here’s what I learned.

First, I bought the generic organic tofu – extra firm, but still squishy in regards to the final product.  I cut the tofu into about 1/4 inch slices and pressed them with paper towels to dry them out as much as possible.  (Nothing new here, this is standard prep work for tofu)  Then I laid them flat in a large ziplock baggie and filled it with a rough 1:1 mix of water and soy sauce with a splash of worchestire sauce and liquid hickory smoke.  I set that in the fridge and let it go for a few hours while I worked.

Now, the biggest thing I did differently than any other time was that I cooked the tofu slices for about 10 minutes on very high heat with a small amount of safflower oil.  I’ve never used “high heat” oil for tofu before, and so I’ve never been able to utilize the temperatures needed to toughen and crisp the slices.  It was beautiful!  Golden brown slices that didn’t just dissolve in my mouth.  There’s no faking corned beef, but this was damn good.

I placed a few stacks of the tofu slices on some pumpernickel bread smeared with Harvest Ground mustard and Thousand Island Dressing, and topped it all with a good swiss cheese and my homemade sauerkraut (left over from Oktoberfest).  I broiled the sandwich in the toaster, and viola!

In all honesty, I think the sauerkraut made the sandwich what it was, but the marinated tofu cooked to perfection was what I’ve been missing all these years.  It was fantastic, and I’d even wager that my father would like it.