Blocks of tofu are good as free-for-all, do-whatever-you-like food. Of course, it does already come in other shapes and flavors too. You can get it shaped like burgers, weiners, slices, crumbles...the list goes on and on. Check the produce section of your market, all the alternatives should be right in with the plain ol' blocks.

 

Tofu molds have traditionally been made of wood. It's much easier to form slates into a rectamgle than it is to form them into other shapes.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Limes

Blocks of tofu are good as free-for-all, do-whatever-you-like food. Of course, it does already come in other shapes and flavors too. You can get it shaped like burgers, weiners, slices, crumbles...the list goes on and on. Check the produce section of your market, all the alternatives should be right in with the plain ol' blocks.

Those other things you're talking about may be soy based or have soy in them, but they're not tofu. Tofu is a specific, simple product made from adding a coagulant to soy milk so that the curds separate from the water.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by mlp

Tofu molds have traditionally been made of wood. It's much easier to form slates into a rectamgle than it is to form them into other shapes.

Yeah I thought of that as a possible reason too, I just wondered for a while if there was some other specific reason why they all were blocks. Thanks for the input!

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by mlp

Those other things you're talking about may be soy based or have soy in them, but they're not tofu. Tofu is a specific, simple product made from adding a coagulant to soy milk so that the curds separate from the water.

Oh, the ones I was thinking of were labelled 'tofu burger' etc so I just assumed that's all it was.

 

It isn't. I've bought egg tofu in tube forms in plastic wrappings and flavored dessert tofu in individual servings round pudding cups that looked like it had been coagulated inside the package it came in before. Both were silken tofu. In fact, there's tofu making powder mix these days that you can make in whatever shaped mold you like. Perhaps the selections available to you are in square forms only.

 

Also square and similar shapes allow for much less wasted space which is more economical for the manufacturer. If you have 100 square molds and put them side by side, there are no gaps.Round molds would leave gaps.

 

...does it even really matter enough to ask it on a forum? lol

 

My tofu is made for me by a bunch of ancient monks I keep in my cellar. The blocks are shaped like lotus buds and when you put soy sauce on them they open up