Southern Vegan Menu Part 4: Fish Fried Tofu and Fried Pickles

Batter is difficult to make vegan so I used a non-vegan fish recipe that uses no eggs or milk. Here's the original recipe from the +Cooking Channel website.  

I cut two boxes of extra firm tofu into planks about 1/3 of an inch thick and let them sit in the refrigerator all day to drain, then dried them on paper towels before battering them.  First I lightly coated the tofu in cornstarch, then dredged each piece in the batter being careful to let the excess drip off before coating each plank in cornmeal.  I let them fry until golden brown on both sides, a few minutes for each batch, and drained them on a cookie sheet covered with newspaper and paper towels.  I used Bubbies Bread & Butter pickle chips battered the same way, but without cornmeal and they only took about a minute to cook.

Some observations:

Next time I'll just add a small amount of cornmeal to the batter rather than using it as a coating because it was very thick, a little rough, and it flaked off some parts, but still good with hot sauce.  Also, the tofu coated with just cornstarch and beer batter held on very well, and since I used Samuel Smith's Organic Lager, it tasted amazing.  Make sure you season the tofu before you coat it unless you like the taste of plain tofu.  Since I had so much leftover, I used packed individual meals for work and used the tofu to make soft tacos at home.  It microwaved well so fry extra if you like it.

Another idea for next time, I plan to fry the whole jar of pickles; they were very tasty.  And I'd like to try Claussen Bread & Butter Sandwich slices too.  

**You can see a few pickles on the bottom left of the photo in the first post in this series.