Cocoa Jerk Tofu

Have you ever found one of those recipes that just grabs your attention from the moment you read it and then as soon as you taste it, you're just instantly in love with it? That was the case for me with the cocoa jerk tofu from the Superfoods for Life: Cacao cookbook. Even though I had a long list of possible recipes from the cookbook for the Week 7 challenge (since everything sounded so good), I kept coming back to the cocoa jerk tofu. I'm so glad I did, as it was a truly wonderful dish.

I often make adaptations to recipes for things that we have at home or things that we like, but when I saw the list of ingredients for the sauce here, I tried to stick to it as closely as possible. (If you want to see the original, it came up in Google Books when I searched the recipe name ... or just get the book.) One of the hardest things to get right in a dish is the seasoning, especially the balance of the seasoning, so I figured I would try the recipe as-written to give it its best chance. Amazingly, we had all the sauce ingredients at home already, which is awesome, because now it means I can make it whenever I want as long as I pick up tofu (or some other protein) and some peppers and onions!

For the sauce, I used (and I actually measured for once since I wanted to get the balance exactly as intended):

- 2 tsp Madras curry powder
- 1 tsp chili powder
- 1/2 tsp black pepper
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp allspice
- 2 tbsp sriracha
- 1/3 cup cocoa powder
- 1/4 cup low sodium soy sauce
- 1/3 cup vegetable broth (for me, really 1/3 cup water + small spoonful of Better than Bouillon)
- 3 minced garlic cloves
- 1 tbsp agave nectar
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- 2 tbsp hoisin sauce
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp ground oregano

The list looks long, but there wasn't anything to actually "prep" other than the garlic. Everything else came straight from the jar, bottle, or container, so it was much easier than it looks.

The non-sauce ingredient list was really short: 1 container of firm tofu, 1 yellow onion, 1 red bell pepper, and 1 green bell pepper. Very easy. Adding this to the sauce, the approximate cost of the recipe was $7.92. It made a good amount of food, so that was a pretty fair price. (It does need a grain or something else on the side, so tack on another $1 or $2 to the total.)

Making the cocoa jerk tofu was really easy. The process reminded me of another baked tofu recipe (here) that I really liked that I also did for one of the cooking challenges. Make the sauce, add the tofu and vegetables, bake, done. It really was that simple. Perfect for a weeknight meal because there is so little work involved! To make the recipe:

1. Mince the garlic and add to a small bowl with all the other sauce ingredients. Mix well.

The original recipe said to blend all of this in a blender, but I just used a spoon and a small bowl and it was completely fine. The only thing that would even really be broken up in the blender is the garlic and we didn't care if there were garlic pieces in the sauce. I mince garlic fairly small as it is, so why waste the blender?

2. Slice the onion and peppers into thin slices. Cut the tofu into blocks (or squares, whatever you want). I tried to make sure the pieces were thin enough to soak up as much sauce as possible.

3. Mix the tofu and vegetables into the sauce so that everything is well-coated. Let it sit for a little bit.

And here's where reading comprehension comes in again (just like here and here). I was reading the recipe right before I was going to start prepping and I saw that I was supposed to let the tofu and vegetables sit in the sauce for an hour. Oops. I didn't notice that the first time around when I read it. I ended up letting it sit for about 15-20 minutes as I let the oven preheat and I did some work. Maybe it would have been even better if I let it sit for an hour, but 20 minutes seemed fine if you're in a rush (or didn't notice the marinating instruction).

4. Bake at 400 degrees for about 40 minutes, stirring everything halfway through. The original recipe called for 30 minutes of baking and then some broiling, but skipping the broiling and just baking a little longer seemed fine to us. It really wasn't the most attractive dish coming out of the oven, but who cared what it looked like when it tasted so good?

Wow. That was basically our reaction once we tried this dish. It was fantastic! We had both tried a little bit of it before it went into the oven and the sauce was incredible. There were so many nuances to it because of all the different ingredients and you could definitely taste the chocolate, but the flavors were also so balanced. It was even better when it came out of the oven because the heat came through much more than it did when the vegetables were raw (not sure why). We absolutely loved this. I started thinking that maybe I should start adding cocoa powder to everything if it was going to come out this well. So much flavor and completely vegan as well, so we were good to both our taste buds and the environment.

This dish is definitely going on our "make again" list and it's the type of dish that would go into a rotation if we had one, because it's quick and simple to prep, we usually have all the ingredients other than the fresh stuff that we can easily get, and it was so delicious. We loved this so much that it was hard to believe that the other dish we made that night from the same book, which we'll talk about in the next Week 7 challenge post, totally missed the mark for us. We were as unenthused about that one as we were thrilled with this one. But overall, we are just so happy with this challenge because of this awesome tofu dish!