Issue 01: The Tofu Issue

Editor's note

Every issue of Tofuology starts with a single question. This one is deceptively simple: what happens when a bean becomes something else?

We spent four months trying to answer it from as many angles as we could manage — visiting a fourth-generation workshop in Kyoto, testing alternative coagulants in our own kitchen, and tracking down a Lyon deli curing tofu like charcuterie.

What we found wasn't a single answer. It was a philosophy showing up in wildly different forms, from a Swedish smokehouse to a Taipei night market stall. That range is, we think, the whole point.

In this issue

Four long reads on makers redefining what tofu can be, a maker profile on a self-taught Brooklyn producer building a craft with no inherited lineage, our first product discovery roundup, a visual essay on the anatomy of a tofu press, and the question that opened this letter, explored from six more angles across the issue.

— The Tofuward Editorial Team

The big question

What actually happens, materially and culturally, when a bean becomes something else?

We don't think this issue fully answers it. We think it's a question worth returning to every quarter, from a different angle each time. That's the whole premise of this magazine.