Chengdu Breakfast for Dinner

All you need is some silken tofu and lots of fun toppings

This quick meal is one of the very simplest dishes I’ve ever made: All you have to do is simmer some silken tofu and add toppings, and you have a warm, comforting meal full of classic Southwestern Chinese flavors.

The dish is basically a cheater’s version of Chengdu-style douhua, a classic breakfast dish, sold from street carts across the city. Traditionally, this dish is made with a pudding-like tofu-egg combination that has a particularly creamy texture, sort of a mix of zhengdan (Chinese steamed eggs that are similar to Japanese chawan) and fresh silken tofu. But you can make a similar dish by simmering store-bought silken tofu in hot water, until it is nice and warm. The result is a little less creamy but no less delicious—and a whole lot faster!

A douhua vendor in Chengdu

For some reason I can’t quite put my finger on, most American cooks seem to think that Chinese food is inherently complicated. Maybe the problem is that most Westerners have a very narrow view of what the cuisine includes and think that everything needs to be stir-fried vigorously in a big, hot wok, like the scenes you see in restaurant kitchens. Or maybe they think that it requires a lot of fancy knife work, thanks to movies where chefs expertly cut vegetables into paper-thin slices with a cleaver. Or maybe it’s just that buying a handful of slightly unfamiliar ingredients to add to the pantry seems like a big commitment. But the thing is, a lot of Chinese food is really simple—things parents and professionals pull together quickly after a long day. And the flavors!

If you like Chinese food but any of the issues above have stopped you from making it—or if you just love Chinese food and want something easy and fun for dinner—this is the perfect dish for you. It requires almost no cooking at all and it’s endlessly variable; you can adjust the toppings to include whatever flavors you particularly like. The ingredients I’ve used here include the ones that reflect the flavors of the traditional Chengdu douhua, but they also just happened to be the things I already had in the kitchen. (And these are all things that are easy to find; most American supermarkets will have at least one kind of Chinese soy sauce, vinegar, and chili crisp sitting on a shelf somewhere. Many markets have a wide variety to choose from.) If you have a particularly well-stocked Chinese pantry, you could also add a few drops of Sichuan pepper oil and/or some zhacai (pickled mustard plant stems) for additional flavor.

The key, to my mind, is the tofu itself. Its delicate flavor is part of the dish’s charm, so the better the tofu you buy, the better the meal. After that, all you need is five minutes and some fun toppings.

Chengdu-Style Simple Tofu Bowl

Servings adjustable

Silken tofu
Soy sauce
Chinese vinegar (I particularly like the types you’ll see labeled with the terms Chinkiang, Zhenjiang, or Baoning)
Chile crisp (I’m a sucker for Fly by Jing, especially their extra crunchy style)
Sichuan pepper oil (optional; use just a couple drops per bowl)
Scallions, thinly sliced
Toasted peanuts, roughly chopped
Cilantro
Fried shallot (optional)
Sesame seeds (optional)

1. Gently put large pieces of silken tofu into a small pot with filtered water. Bring the whole thing to a simmer, and cook for a few minutes, until the tofu is nice and hot.

2. Transfer the tofu to a bowl (having some of the water with it is fine), and add as much of each topping as you like, adjusting as you eat.

Photos: Georgia Freedman, Josh Wand