Last week I made J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Crispy Fried Tofu with Broccoli and Garlic Sauce recipe from his The Wok cookbook.

Unlike the previous fried tofu recipes, this tofu is fried in a thin batter. Kenji says in the introduction to the recipe that he wanted to get a fried tofu that stays crispy in the sauce and found that a batter like the one for Extra-Crispy Korean Fried Chicken did the trick. He also suggests substituting tofu fried in this manner for any of the General Tso’s family of saucy fried chicken dishes.

The batter is made from flour, cornstarch, baking powder, salt, water, and vodka. Tofu slabs are folded into this thin batter and coated.

The battered tofu is fried until pale golden and crisp, and then rested and fried again at a higher temperature to get extra crispy.

The broccoli is blanched first and then stir-fried until “tender-crisp.” The fried tofu is then added along with garlic and ginger. All of that gets stir-fried until fragrant.

A sauce of Shaoxing wine, water, soy sauce, white vinegar, black bean sauce, sugar, and sesame oil is added, and then a splash of cornstarch slurry. Kenji instructs to “cook, tossing, until the sauce thickens, about 30 seconds. Adjust the sauce consistency with more cornstarch if it is too thin or a splash of water if it is too thick.” Then serve.

The flavor of the dish was good, but something was off about the ingredient amounts. First, it calls for a pound of broccoli, which is a lot compared to 12 ounces of tofu. I had a lot more broccoli than the picture in the book shows. Second, it was way too much sauce. I added all of the cornstarch slurry, and it was still thin and would have taken much longer than 30 seconds to cook off the volume. Between the wine, water, soy sauce, and vinegar, the recipe calls for 3/4-cup of liquid in the sauce. That was not going to thicken with the called-for amount of cornstarch slurry, and it would still be too sauce even if it did thicken.

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