Easy Celery Black Pepper Tofu. Spicy, hot. Roasted crisp tofu, added to celery & black pepper sauce. How to make Black pepper Tofu. Vegan Gluten-free nut-free. Can be oil-free. serves 2 with rice.
So I have discovered recently that I love black pepper. Not the usual pepper in usual amounts, but freshly crushed in a mortar pestle and in ridiculous amounts. One would think that when the temps around are in the 80s. why would one eat something that is so sweat inducing. Well I do not have the answer to that question. Its just fun to down a chilled ice cream shake after to cool down.
This black pepper tofu is has pepper in the batter, some red chilies to add more heat, and more, lots more pepper in the sauce. I added celery as it adds a nice balance to all the heat and also because I had to use it up.
Tofu is tossed in starch and pepper batter and baked until crisp. You can also pan fry the tofu or just add plain pressed tofu directly to the pan. The sauce has loads of garlic, ginger and celery and freshly crushed black pepper. I finally used my mortar and pestle after many months. The coarsely crushed pepper is just fabulous. You can make the dish oil free by cooking the sauce ingredients in broth.
More recipes from the blog.
- Kung Pao Lentils
- Tofu Broccoli Bok Choy Stir fry with Garlic Sesame Soy Sauce
- Teriyaki Chickpea Bao steamed buns
- Firecracker Chickpea Salad with Thai Peanut Sauce dressing.
- Spicy Orange Tofu and Peppers.
Did you know that
– in 2010, the global apparel industry produced more than 150 billion garments, enough to provide more than 20 new articles of clothing to every person on the planet.
– Fashion is a super-consumer of water at almost every stage of its highly complex supply chain, from growing the raw materials, to the dyeing of fabrics, from manufacturing the garments, to transporting them to market. If you consider it takes 2,700 litres of water to produce one cotton t-shirt from ‘crop to shop’.
Read more about the impact of fashion here
Ashlee covers Eco-friendly school supplies, backpacks and shoes to paper and pencils on her video segment here
Mercy for Animals’s new video about how we are all born with compassion.
Celery Black Pepper Tofu
Ingredients
Baked Tofu:
- 14 oz (396.89 g) firm tofu cubed (1.5 cups) - no need to press
- 3 tsp soy sauce
- 2 tsp water
- 1/4 tsp (0.25 tsp) garlic powder
- 1/4 tsp (0.25 tsp) black pepper
- 3 to 4 Tbsp (3 to 4 tbsp) cornstarch or other starch
For the sauce:
- 1 tsp oil
- 6 to 8 cloves of garlic chopped
- 1 inch ginger finely chopped
- 2 dried red chilies chopped or broken into 2 pieces use 1 for less heat. I like arbol or cayenne in this. Use milder chile like california red for more flavor than heat
- 1 to 1.5 cup (225 to 337.5 g) chopped celery
- 1/4 cup (37.25 g) chopped green bell pepper or onion
- 1/4 tsp (0.25 tsp) white pepper optional
- 1 tsp or more coarsely crushed black pepper preferably ground/crushed with a mortar pestle
- 1 tbsp soy sauce
- 1 tbsp water
- 1 tsp maple or sugar
- 1/2 tsp (0.5 tsp) rice vinegar
Instructions
Baked Tofu:
- Chop the Tofu and keep ready. Make a thick batter of soy sauce through cornstarch. (add a tsp more water if needed, but dont add too much as the tofu will add its own moisture when you mix it in). Immediately Add tofu and mix to coat. * If you leave the batter to sit, it will solidify in a few minutes and will need extra moisture to be batter again.
- Let it marinate for 10 to 15 minutes. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F / 200ºc. Place the tofu cubes on parchment lined baking sheet. Bake for 20 minutes or longer. Or pan fry in oil until golden. Keep aside
Make the sauce:
- Heat oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add garlic ginger and red chili and cook until garlic is translucent. 2 to 3 minutes.
- Add the celery and peppers. Mix, cover and cook for 4 to 5 minutes or until celery is cooked to preference. Stir once in between.
- Add the baked tofu, pepper, soy sauce, 1 tbsp water, maple, vinegar and mix. Cook for 2 minutes. Serve hot!
Notes
Variations: You can also use meat subs like beyond meat strips at the last step instead of tofu for a black pepper chikin.,
- Add half the black pepper if you are unsure about the heat level and mix in the rest later to preference. Nutritional values based on one serving
Nutrition
This dish was amazing! I have it on rotation. It satisfies my need to buy this from Panda Express. I often use simple marinated tofu done in my air fryer.
excellent – nice – probably crisps it up nicely
Excellent dish – great way to use up celery which for some reason gets a bad rap in our house. Doubled the veg and tofu and almost tripled the sauce. Excellent flavors, beautifully spicy and fresh.
celery is underrated
This recipe is one of our favorites! We make this regularly in our household and it’s delicious every time.
Excellent
We love this and have been making it for years. I used to only get celery occasionally to use as part of a soup and then not know what to do with the leftovers. Now I get celery for this dish regularly and use the leftovers for soup–if there are any. It is flexible and always turns out great even if we are missing some of the ingredients (still delicious even without the tofu!). Thank you!!
thanks for popping in! flexible is great
I had extra celery so I googled Celery tofu and this recipe cane up. I’m so happy it did. It’s delicious. All the flavors blend great together and so easy to make. Thanks for sharing
thanks for stopping by & for the rating. i’m. glad you found that recipe
Like restaurant food! I added some peanuts at the end because it tasted sort of kung pao to me.
Excellent recipe! Thank you.
I love this recipe, I’ve made it several times and it’s delicious, fast and easy! Than uou Richa <3
Oh My !!! I had lots of celery to use so when I found this recipe I immediately headed to the kitchen and decided to double the recipe. That being said – my kitchen is TINY. So I used the saute function on my Instant Pot to make this dish. For the tofu – after noticing folks making comments about the cornstarch mixture – I diced my tofu and put it in a gallon ziploc bag. I made the cornstarch mixture which turned into a hard clump – and tossed it in the ziploc bag with the tofu. Sure enough – I tossed until the cornstarch mixture was thoroughly coating the tofu. After 10 minutes – I put the tofu in the oven – skeptical that 20 minutes would result in nicely baked tofu. Magic. The tofu came out perfect. I chopped my ginger and garlic in a mini processor and everything came together very quickly.
I am now going to make a pot of brown rice and bring this to work for lunch the next few days. The heat and spice was nice – but with such a large batch, I will be inclined to add an extra dried abrol pepper. Somehow the heat of the garlic/ginger/pepper and dried pepper was not as potent as I was hoping for. (My error I am sure)
Thank you …
crack the chilies open for extra heat.
Thank you. Love your cookbooks which have taught me to appreciate and indulge in the magic of spices.
10AM and I am eating Celery-Black Pepper-Tofu at my office desk …. YUM
awesome
I asjusted the servings to 5 and the recipe now says 15 to 20 cloves of garlic? Is that correct? I like garlic but sounds like a lot.
😀 the widget just multiplies the values. You can use less to preference. i think 10 would be sufficient. The garlic and pepper are the main flavors in the sauce.
Absolutely delicious! I looked in the fridge today to find tofu and celery, and somehow the combo sounded promising so I did a google search for recipes. This was the first match and it is a definite keeper. I used ground Aleppo chili instead of dried chilies, and I will do that again. Other than that, I made no substitutions.
awesome!
with 2 tbsp soy sauce, yes there will be sodium. but is far less than what you get from a restaurant. Add some veggies and serve with brown rice so you eat less of the tofu serving and balance it out.
Did you bake or fry the tofu pictured? If fried, any advice on how to prevent sticking in the pan?
Looks great–can’t wait to try!
its baked on parchment lined sheet. To pan fry, you need a good non stick or seasoned cast iron. Add tofu only when the pan is hot. Put the tofu in a strainer and tap once or twice to remove the excess cornstarch slurry. You can also just dust the pressed tofu in dry cornstarch and then pan fry.
Didn’t think I could love you more until I saw this post <3 .Your piece on fast fashion is amazing and I'm so glad you're educating people out there. Thanks for being an amazing human being :')
Thanks! Its such a big and hard problem now. We grew up recycling all our older cousins clothes and barely any clothes shopping. No wonder the garbage cans needed were small.
This was delicious and making a second batch now. I ommited garlic powder as I didn’t have any on hand, added extra celery (have a lot of use!) and took out one of the chilles (bit too much punch for me!). It is very nice to have found a vegan food blogger who actually makes food you’d want to eat, instead of food which just looks nice. Keep up the great work!
Delicious, easy and quick! Thanks!
Made this tonight. ABSOLUTELY DELICIOUS! Thanks for yet another great recipe!!
Just finished off my first bowl of this (more to come!) You’ve convinced me to cook with more black pepper!! And I rarely use celery but lately I’ve been craving it so this was perfect. So glad I had everything on hand–except the chiles: I used a couple pinches of cayenne instead. Too much though! It was spicy! I’ll definitely try this again soon and tone it down a little ????
Awesome! The dried chilies add some smokyness. Black pepper is hot too, so you can omit the chilies or cayenne. adjust to heat preference. 🙂
I’ve recently discovered that I love black pepper too!!!
Thank you for this amazing recipe! I made it last night and it will become a regular in my rotation. I used a combo of celery, bell pepper and onion. The only issue I had was the tofu stuck to the parchment. Next time I will spray it with oil or make it in a skillet. I love how easy it was to throw everything together.
Awesome! a bit of oil should help. also toss in a bit more starch so the tofu coating is thick ,so it wont flow off during baking and stick to the bottom. it also depends on the parchment. I picked up a different brand one time and even my cookies stuck to it.
Are the amount right for the marinade? I used 3 tsp soy, 2 tsp water and 3 tbsp cornstarch and it’s dry as a bone. Is it me? 🙁
yes. It will take a minute to mix in. the starch should get all gloopy initially. you can add 1-2 tsp more water. also the tofu will have some moisture of its own when you mix in.
Thank you – I added more soy and water, and it wasn’t perfect, but overall the taste was FANTASTIC and I’ll try again. Probably tomorrow. 🙂
Awesome!!
made it again today and I left the thick cornstarch marinade sitting for 10 minutes while i prepped. It did get chalky in that much time. Mix, immediately add the Tofu and let it sit.
Made this last night… wow… super easy and super tasty. I love black pepper! And love the simplicity of baking the marinated tofu, then just tossing in with the celery and (in my case) onions. This was delicious. Thanks for the recipe.
awesome! yep, it saves the time needed to stand in the kitchen crisping up the tofu in the pan 🙂
Hey Richa! I’ve been following your blog for a while now but this recipe has to be one of my favourites so far-it looks absolutely delicious and the ingredient list is crazy!
http://www.wonderstruckfawns.com
I thought you also might like to check out my vegan travel blog? I want to change the stigma that it is too hard to travel and remain vegan, so i blog about my adventures of doing just that! Let me know what you think?!
Yum! This was delicious. We had it last night for dinner and ate every drop. I had to substitute zucchini for the green pepper. We only used one red chili and it had the right amount of heat for us. Tasty.
Awesome!!
This looks delicious!! Im heading to the shop right now to get some more tofu 😉 Cant wait to get back and start cooking 😀
Thank you!
lilirenarde.blogspot.co.uk
This looks really good, Richa! Love all the black pepper!
Oh yeah!! This looks and sounds wonderful! I am also a total black pepper fanatic. It’s just got such a wonderful flavor, and in large quantities, it has quite a kick. Plus, I am also a major fan of celery (weird but true, I love it so much!), and tofu… so it’s almost like you made this recipe up just for me! Looking forward to trying it. 🙂
Yum. I love lots of black pepper too!
Looks like addictive crack in a bowl–so yummy! 😀
I happened upon this recipe as I was planning dinner and went for it! It came together easily with ingredients most people will have around. And it was really good! Great blend of flavours. Could add just a little more maple syrup or agave as a finishing touch. Thanks for posting!
yay! awesome! sure add more maple if you like. you can also make it more saucy with some extra broth or water. i keep eating it right from the pan.
This recipe is a change of pace. Love the flavors in here. What type of dried chiles did you use?
i used arbol. they are hot! 🙂
This looks stunning. Will definitely make this and comment here on how it went. Well done 🙂
This black pepper dish sounds fantastic, can’t wait to try it. Thank you very much for calling attention to the enormous amount of resources used for clothing. I am going to turn a blind eye to all the slick fashion advertising and buy only what I need! I’ll be searching for linen and hemp fibers free of synthetics.
Thanks Tamar. I know right, with the kind of wear and throw fashion these days, we hardly stop to think of the impact. I miss the good old days when the clothes were great material, not toxic treated, and lasted many many years.
Richa, your cookbook is fabulous! I love the care you took at the beginning to explain the spices, the photography is excellent & of course the recipes are amazing! This was such a great purchase!
Hi Victoria, Thank you so much for getting my book and loving it! a lot of work went into it and I am so thankful that everyone is liking and appreciating it! <3 <3
Well, I know what we are having for dinner now — thanks very much. Too bad I just used all of our tofu the other day, now I am off to the store to buy some more. Cheers! 🙂