Easy Sweet and Spicy Baked Tofu

Both Dan and I like Asian salads. I don’t know exactly why we like them, but we do. I wanted to try to make one that didn’t include a lot of sodium. Since I normally use liquid aminos and/or miso I know keeping the sodium down was going to tough.

While liquid aminos is lower in sodium than soy sauce it still contains a good bit of sodium. According to the nutrition label on the bottle it has 160mg of sodium per ½ teaspoon. Seriously? How many of us consider ½ teaspoon a serving of liquid aminos. I used to use one, two or three tablespoons depending on what I was making. I am only pointing out the sodium in liquid aminos so that you are all aware that each tablespoon contains 960mg of sodium.

I decided that we would start with tofu for the salad and then work on a dressing that wouldn’t add too much sodium. Here is the tofu I baked today:

Easy Sweet and Spicy Baked Tofu
Makes 7 slices

Ingredients:

14 ounce block extra firm tofu, well pressed and cut into seven slices (frozen and defrosted if you want a more chewy texture)
1 ½ tablespoons apricot preserves or orange marmalade
Sriracha, to taste
quatre epices, or Chinese 5 spice powder, or cardamom and powdered ginger, to taste

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with silpat or parchment. Place the tofu slices on the prepared pan.

Heat the apricot preserves in your microwave until it just starts to melt. Twenty seconds was enough in my microwave. Add a little sriracha, stir and taste. Continue to add sriracha until you like the heat level.

Use a spoon to apply a little of the spicy sweet sauce to your tofu. Sprinkle the top of the tofu with quatre epices, Chinese 5 spice powder, or cardamom and ginger. Any of those would work fine.

Bake the tofu until you like the texture. We tend to like ours more firm so I bake it for at least 45 minutes, sometimes longer.

Store in a covered container in your refrigerator until needed. This would be great cold on an Oriental style salad with edamame.

Nutritional Information (for 1/7th of the recipe):

Amount Per Serving
Calories - 62.94
Calories From Fat (44%) - 27.68

Total Fat - 3.32g
Saturated Fat - 0.31g
Cholesterol - 0mg
Sodium - 20.54mg
Potassium - 78.21mg
Total Carbohydrates - 4.1g
Fiber - 0.26g
Sugar - 2.29g
Protein - 5.65g

Comments:

This tofu is a little too good if you know what I mean. I did taste it in the interest of quality control of course. I may have to keep this on the rarely list or risk eating too much of it. Something tells me the hubby will love this one.

I will be working on a low sodium Oriental salad dressing tomorrow. After I get that taken care of I will post it and the salad that accompanies this tofu.

Unrelated notes:

Somehow I ended up spending quite a bit of time in the kitchen today. It appears I am making up for the last few days. I also made an eggplant dip this afternoon. That recipe will get posted tomorrow. I am running out of the time to write that post tonight.

Talk to you all again tomorrow. I hope everyone is having a good Wednesday. We are more than half way to the weekend!