Tofu Faux Fried Chicken

This has been on my mind for a while. So today (it took a day) I finally did it. Tofu Fried Chicken.

Take some firm, or extra firm tofu, press it and throw it in the freezer. My joke here is that I can tell people that I used my Blue Kitchen Cookbook for this recipe. See the photos. Press and dry you tofu, I cut mine in half to freeze quicker. This process helps make the tofu more ‘meat-like.’ Some people freeze, de-thaw and freeze again. I’ll try that some day.

Then I tore the thawed pieces into chucks in a tray and soaked them in chicken broth for a few minutes.

Like fried chicken, there is a bath/dredge. For my bath I had a little fun. Instead of buttermilk, I did the usual substitute of milk with vinegar…except I used oat milk with apple cider vinegar. And then to be really crazy, (and this isn’t required, but I had it on hand) I put in a tablespoon of egg white powder as a thickener/binder. In hind sight, I may put the egg powder in the dredge.

For the dredge I put in…

Almond flour
Italian Seasoning
Garlic Salt
Celery Salt
White Pepper
Black Pepper
Paprika
Ginger
Mustard Powder

So, take your chunks out of the chicken broth, dip them in your faux, faux buttermilk and put them in the dredge. The tofu is pretty sensitive at this point, so I used a large fork to toss them around and put them on a plate.

These went on my air-fryer mesh, and were sprayed with olive oil (see Misto Olive Oil Sprayer on the interwebtubes). The tray was then air-fried for 20 minutes at 400°. There’s no raw food here, so just to to the point it looks good and crispy.

I made two yogurt based dipping sauces for these. The first is basically a tzatziki sauce. Yogurt, diced cucumbers (I used my pickled cucumbers), dill, lemon juice. The second was yogurt and whatever I had in my fridge that was spicy. I did some Thai red curry, chululu hot sauce, cayenne pepper and some chili oil.

We served this with a baked potato and peas as well as some of our pickled cucumbers. The star of the baked potato was putting the tzatziki into it. Fantastic! This will show up again, and I’ve never seen this combo before.

The result was a really fun, unexpected meal.