hello hi everyone! Wesley here. Today we’re diving back into our series dedicated to the Bay Area restaurant scene with a part 2 of our Spices 3 episode. For those unfamiliar, Spices 3 is a Bay Area local legend in downtown Oakland that sports a variety of both creative and traditionally classic Chinese and/or Sichuan dishes. More specifically today we’re taking a shot at their chou doufu or “stinky tofu,” which is a firm tofu that has been fermented in bean curd, then shallow fried and served with a dipping sauce.

At Spices 3 (as well as most stateside restaurants), you’ll often come across this dish as a shared plate, typically ordered with family style meals. But outside of the states, you’ll more often find them at Chinese and Taiwanese nightmarket stalls, where you can order this dish on the go, and eat it with kabob skewers (and no, i have no idea why you wouldn’t just eat it with a fork). The dish (as the name implies) is quite stinky and pungent coming from the 48 hour soak in fermented bean curd, and for what it’s worth, definitely ranks pretty high on my list of more adventurous dishes to try in Chinese cuisine, up there with chicken feet and pig’s blood popsicles (please don’t ask me to make those. I regret mentioning these already). Hope you try it

It will be out on Friday January 7, 2022, so bookmark the recipe here, and be sure to subscribe and hit the bell on YouTube to get notified when it’s out!

Woo Can Cook is a series where we reproduce fun foods and recipes from my childhood. Some of them are authentically Chinese and/or pan-Asian, but a lot of them are odd Americanized versions that I inherited from my parents and grandparents while growing up in the Bay Area/California.

We're live streaming every Tues at 6:30PM PST, with new recipes out every Friday!