Changshou Smoked Blood Tofu 长寿血豆腐
Changshou Smoked Blood Tofu is featured among the local specialties of Chongqing.
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Changshou Smoked Blood Tofu (长寿血豆腐) is a specialty of Changshou District (长寿区) in Chongqing: fresh tofu mashed with pig's blood, fatty pork and spices, shaped into ovals and smoked over a wood fire.
How it is made
The process has more than a dozen steps, and making the tofu takes nearly ten of them. Soybeans are soaked in clean water, for six to seven hours in summer and nine to ten in winter, then ground into soy milk and strained. The milk is boiled for half an hour and set with brine drawn evenly across its surface, and the curd is pressed for about 20 minutes into a fairly dry tofu.
The white tofu is rubbed into fine crumbs in a large basin and stirred in one direction to a paste. Strips of fatty pork about 7 millimetres thick, pig's blood, salt and five-spice powder are then mixed in, and portions of about 150 grams are shaped by hand into ovals.
The filled bamboo trays are left somewhere warm, at around 25 degrees Celsius, so that the pieces give up water, and each piece is squeezed by hand once or twice to set its shape. All the pieces are then hung above a wood-fired stove and smoked for about three hours.
Where it comes from
Changshou blood tofu was already on sale as far away as Beijing and Guangdong in the Guangxu reign of the Qing. Sun Zhiping (孙志平), a Changshou man who served as a circuit intendant in Beijing and Guangdong, had some made at home each Spring Festival and took it back to serve guests and give to friends and relatives.
Changshou students studying in Beijing did the same after their winter and summer holidays: when classmates visited they boiled the blood tofu and ate it over wine. That custom produced the saying "wine with blood tofu, and at table we remember old friends" (酒加血豆腐，入席思故友).
The district now presents it as an intangible-heritage folk snack. In the 2025 Chongqing "Yuwei 360 Bowls" (渝味360碗) selection it was named among Changshou's dishes of greatest cultural value, together with Changshou fish noodles, Changshou rice noodles and Changshou qiaoke fish (长寿翘壳鱼).
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Fairy Tofu Green Leaf Jelly 神豆腐 →
Both are Chongqing specialties sold as tofu; the Changshou one is soybean curd mixed with pig's blood and fatty pork and then wood-smoked.
Questions before you order
Does Changshou Smoked Blood Tofu contain blood?
Yes. Pig's blood is mixed into the mashed tofu together with strips of fatty pork, salt and five-spice powder before the pieces are shaped and smoked.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-23. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.