Two weeks ago I made the Shrimp-Stuffed Fried Tofu recipe from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook.

This recipe consists of a shrimp filling that’s formed into balls and placed into divots in soft tofu blocks, which is then fried.

For the filling, chopped shrimp, roasted sesame oil, Shaoxing wine, soy sauce, cornstarch, white pepper, and salt are mixed together until a sticky mixture forms.

Kenji calls for a 12-oz block of soft tofu, cut in half horizontally, then lengthwise, then twice crosswise for 12 blocks of tofu. The tofu blocks at our store are 16 ounces, so I cut in half horizontally and lengthwise and then three times crosswise for 16 blocks of tofu. I saved the additional 4 blocks to fry without filling for my vegetarian daughter.

For each tofu block, a divot is carved out with a ¼-teaspoon. For my blocks, the ¼-teaspoon was about the width of tofu itself. I had to make a shallow divot to keep the sides intact.

Kenji then instructs to use the ¼-teaspoon to measure out balls of the shrimp mixture, aiming for “12 roughly equal-sized balls.” That did not work for me. I could either do many more than 12 ¼-teaspoon balls or 12 much larger balls. A twelfth of the mixture was much too large for my tofu divots, so I did the smaller ¼-teaspoon scoops and had filling left over.

The filling ball gets rolled in cornstarch, then placed in a tofu block divot, and then the top of the tofu is pressed into the cornstarch “lightly flattening the shrimp ball and adding a thin layer of cornstarch to the top of the tofu block.”

The stuffed tofu then gets deep fried until crisp and golden. I fried my daughter’s plain blocks first, then the stuffed tofu. Kenji warns that the shrimp balls might fall out while frying and to just place them back in when everything’s done. I only had a few fall out. After frying the tofu blocks, I formed the leftover filling into large balls and fried them alongside some additional shrimp that didn’t make it into the filling.

The stuffed tofu is served with a simple sauce of soy sauce, water, sugar, and scallions.

The end result was very good! I didn’t quite feel it was a main dish, and it was a fair amount of work for a small plate/appetizer/finger food. But it was certainly tasty.

I am cooking my way through J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. Read more about it.