Kaizhou Pressed Dried Tofu 开州豆干
Kaizhou Pressed Dried Tofu is featured among the local specialties of Chongqing.
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Kaizhou Pressed Dried Tofu (开州豆干) is the brined and air-dried bean curd of Zishui Township (紫水乡), in the mountains of northern Kaizhou (开州), Chongqing, where it is called Zishui dried tofu (紫水豆干). Kaizhou Daily, reprinted by People's Daily Online, traces Zishui tofu to the Qing dynasty. It credits the dried version to an old woman of the Wu family (邬氏) in the late Qing or early Republic, who cut leftover tofu into small pieces and dried them on a pot lid for stir-frying.
Ingredients
The beans are tiankan beans (田坎豆, 'field-ridge beans'), a small old local soybean that Zishui villagers plant on the ridges of wet paddy fields; China News Service describes them as fine-textured with a strong bean aroma. The family of fourth-generation maker Chen Xiankun (陈先坤), who learned the craft from his mother Zhou Xianchun (周先春), has always used water from an old well at its home, a spot called Laojingwu (老井屋, 'old well house').
How it is made
The cleaned beans soak for about four hours, are ground on a stone mill, and the milk is strained through hemp cloth on a cross-shaped frame. The boiled soy milk is set with gypsum at about 90 °C, two liang of gypsum to ten jin of beans (about 100 g to 5 kg), and the curds are pressed in a box for two hours.
The tofu is then sun-dried or baked dry over a fire until its edges turn faintly yellow, boiled for two minutes in a brine seasoned with salt, soy sauce, old ginger and other seasonings, cooled, returned to the brine over a low flame for five minutes and cooled again, up to six rounds in all. Finally the pieces air-dry on bamboo mats.
Flavour and texture
Kaizhou Daily describes the pieces as firm outside and tender inside, very chewy and full of flavour, and quotes a saying that there is no trick to Zishui dried tofu: it all depends on good steeping. Hualong Net (华龙网) reports that the producer adds no preservatives, so shelf life is short, and stir-fries the dried tofu over small stoves. A man who grew up beside Zishui recalled that people in the township made their own dried tofu, stir-fried for a long time until dry and chewy, and that his family cooked it only at festivals.
Where it comes from
Zishui lies more than 40 km from the county town over rough mountain roads, and villagers mostly made the dried tofu for themselves. In 2014 Mou Wei (牟韦) founded Chongqing Zishui Soy Products Co. (重庆紫水豆制品有限公司) in the township. She told China News Service in 2025 that Zishui dried tofu, a district-level intangible cultural heritage item when the company started, is now a Chongqing municipal one.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.