Shuibei Tofu 水北豆腐
Shuibei Tofu is featured among the local specialties of Jiangxi.
Shuibei Tofu (水北豆腐) is the hand-made bean curd of Shuibei (水北), a town in Yushui District (渝水区) of Xinyu (新余), Jiangxi. Villages there have kept up the habit of grinding soybeans by hand to make tofu, and the making technique entered Xinyu's second batch of municipal intangible cultural heritage items in 2012.
How it is made
The Xinyu committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (新余市政协) sums up the local method as soaking the beans in cold water, grinding them on a hand-turned stone mill, boiling the soy milk in an iron wok and setting it with gypsum. It traces the technique to the soy-curd (菽乳) methods of the Qiantang River (钱塘江) in Zhejiang and of Huainan (淮南) in Anhui, adapted locally over more than a thousand years.
In the recorded steps, 5 kg of shelled, cleaned soybeans soak for about three hours (four to five in winter) and are ground with 6 kg of water per kilogram of beans. The slurry is squeezed through a tofu-cloth bag, then mixed with another 3 kg of water and squeezed again. The raw milk is boiled and skimmed, and gypsum ground to powder and mixed with water is poured into milk ladled from the wok and stirred gently until curds form within minutes. Ladled into a cloth-lined wooden tray and pressed for 10 to 20 minutes, the curd becomes soft 'water tofu' (水豆腐); weighted with stones until the water is squeezed out, it becomes firm tofu.
Flavour and texture
Made this way, Shuibei Tofu is described as white as jade, fragrant and tender, soft and smooth. A Xinyu saying holds that well-made Shuibei tofu beats bird's nest.
Where it comes from
Qian Guisheng (钱贵圣), an elder of Qianwei village (钱圩村), links the tofu to the general Yue Fei (岳飞). In 1131 Yue Fei's troops camped at the village on their way to put down uprisings in Jizhou and Qianzhou, and the villagers served a feast made entirely of tofu: sheets, rolls, blocks and shreds. In the story, which the Qian clan genealogy also records, Yue Fei took the cook with him on campaign, and over time the tofu's fame spread with the general's.
The tofu has also moved into a modern product: People's Daily Online reported in 2022 that a Shuibei company turns it into Shuibei tofu ice cream, described as 'ice cream when frozen, tofu pudding when melted'.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and fact-checked against them on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.
Image credits & notes (1)
- Reference photo of a similar dish · 同类菜品参考照片A similar preparation is pictured; the local version may differ. 同类菜品参考照片，当地做法可能不同。Photo: Archon6812 · CC BY-SA 3.0Resized for the web; the photo itself has not been edited. Thumbnails may show a cropped view.
