It’s Time To Make A Tofu Scramble

While I wouldn’t agree with Chuck Schumer that the price of eggs is the most important thing on Americans’ minds these days, there’s no denying that eggs cost a lot more than they used to, and that’s a bummer. If you’re looking for a breakfast alternative, you can’t go wrong with a tofu scramble.

But let’s be clear here: I don’t mean a fancy one, using Just Egg or other egg alternatives that have come about since I was last regularly cooking for vegans. I mean a late 90s/early 2000s tofu scramble, the kind you made in a batch when your trainhopping pals passed through your town, or the kind you woke up to at the punk house where your band crashed. One that kind of looked like eggs, but wasn’t trying to taste like eggs; one that was wholly itself. 

I was first introduced to tofu scramble at the feminist vegetarian restaurant I worked at as a teen in the late 90s (a foundational but complicated bit of Riley lore), where I would sometimes end up taking an entire trashbag of it home after a brunch shift even though I didn’t like it very much. It wasn’t until my 20s, immersed in activist and punk scenes in Boston and New York, that it became a regular feature of my diet, the kind of thing you could reliably whip up and assume that everyone could eat. You could fill it out with whatever vegetables someone had dumpster dived, and in my memory it could be scaled exponentially without needing to run out for more tofu, though obviously that can’t be right.

The only must-have ingredient I remember it having was turmeric, which is what made it yellow. Several recipes these days suggest adding black salt to mimic the sulphurous taste of eggs, and while that sounds great and I certainly wouldn’t stop you, it feels like gilding the lily. A tofu scramble isn’t “vegan eggs;” it’s a tofu scramble, the staple dish of a certain time and place for me, the fuel of a particular version of myself and my communities.

This weekend I decided to recreate that tofu scramble, but my memory was hazy beyond tofu and turmeric. So I turned to the pinnacle of vegan cooking at the time (and arguably still today), Isa Chandra Moskowitz of Post Punk Kitchen. There’s a recipe on her site from 2009, the exact era I hoped to recapture. It features nutritional yeast, one of the best things veganism has given us, as well as cumin and thyme, which I don’t remember adding to tofu scrambles but which were great additions, savory and earthy in a way scrambled eggs are not but which tofu scramble definitely is. You rip the tofu into chunks, pan-fry it until it’s browned in some spots, then dump in the spices and mix it all together. The result was precisely what I was hoping for: a little bit dry and ugly as hell, but tasting exactly how I remembered it. I paired it with the home fries recipe I used to make in bucket-sized batches at the feminist restaurant (boiled and then fried, with paprika and peppers), and was transported back to fueling up for marches against the president (oops) or radical queer actions against the HRC (ah damn). 

I’ve never been vegan, and I’m not vegetarian these days either, though I don't cook much meat. While I’m glad if the variety of non-dairy milks or Beyond Meat help more people eat differently, I remember those golden years when vegetarian food stopped being pasta primavera or a portobello mushroom cap with balsamic vinegar but before it tried to mimic meat, when vegan junk food or vegetarian diners were splurges for when you could scrape enough money together. You do not need sausage that bleeds or something from a carton that cooks up like eggs a celebrity chef would make. You just need a hunk of tofu and a jar of turmeric to fuel yourself for the fight.