Night market
- Taipei
- Daily 16:00–00:00
Known forTaiwanese Fried Chicken · Oyster Omelet · Scallion Pancake
In the kitchen
How it’s prepared
Everything starts with the brine, the 臭滷水. Traditional recipes ferment amaranth stems, cabbage, bamboo shoots, shrimp in the shell and salt with naturally occurring microbes, for anywhere from a few days or weeks to about half a year depending on the maker. Fresh tofu is then soaked in the brine for roughly one to several weeks, while microbes break its proteins down into savory amino acids and a little hydrogen sulfide and ammonia, which is where the smell comes from. Each maker keeps a formula, and fully plant-based brines exist too. Taiwan's Food Industry Research and Development Institute has since isolated starter cultures that cut fermentation from four to six months to one or two weeks and make hygiene easier to control.
Most often the tofu is deep-fried until the skin crackles and the center stays custardy, then cut open and dressed with garlic-soy sauce, with a small dish of sweet-sour Taiwanese pickled cabbage on the side and chili sauce if you like. Steamed stinky tofu is softer and the most direct in smell; the mala version simmers it in a spicy, numbing red broth, often with duck blood; and night markets also grill it over charcoal with a brushed-on sauce that softens the odor.
Origins
History and origins
Stinky tofu has many regional forms in China, from the black, crackling fried cubes of Changsha in Hunan to the 'double stink' (蒸雙臭) of Shaoxing in Zhejiang, where stinky tofu is steamed together with fermented amaranth stems. The type sold at Taiwanese night markets descends from Chinese fermented-tofu traditions, but when and how this street snack reached Taiwan is not reliably documented. In Taiwan it grew into fried, steamed, charcoal-grilled and mala-stewed versions and even 'stinky hot pot' (臭臭鍋), and became a night-market signature.
The most repeated origin story credits Wang Zhihe (王致和), an Anhui scholar who failed the imperial exam in Qing-dynasty Beijing, stayed to sell tofu and found that his unsold blocks had fermented into something delicious. That legend, however, concerns Beijing's jarred fermented tofu paste, a different food from the fried street snack, and the story itself cannot be verified. In Taiwan, Shenkeng in New Taipei is known for its tofu, and its old street is lined with tofu restaurants, many of them serving stinky tofu. Why Shenkeng is a matter of dispute; one local account has a Fujianese tofu maker following tea workers to the town and turning to stinky tofu when the tea trade slumped. These remain local lore rather than established history.
