Zhengning Tofu 正宁豆腐
Zhengning Tofu is featured among the local specialties of Gansu.
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Zhengning Tofu (正宁豆腐), also sold as Zhengning Old Tofu (正宁老豆腐), is the bean curd of Zhengning County (正宁县) in Qingyang (庆阳), Gansu. Its old flavour comes from setting the curd with jiangshui (浆水), a sour fermented liquid, and the county government describes it as an everyday dish on local tables and a fixture of the New Year meal.
How it is made
The Zhengning county government's 2026 report from a soy-products plant in the county industrial park, a business that grew out of a hand workshop, follows the work from soaking the beans through grinding, boiling the soy milk and pressing. The soybeans are grown in local villages and soaked for eight hours before grinding; a worker there explains that this keeps the tofu tender without crumbling and gives it enough resilience to hold up in a stir-fry.
The old method is jiangshui dian doufu (浆水点豆腐), setting the curd with jiangshui. To keep that flavour in machine production, the plant ran more than a hundred trials on the soaking time, the moment the coagulant goes in and the temperature at which the soy milk is boiled. It also took advice from older tofu makers, so that the machine-made curd keeps the fine, smooth texture of the handmade kind.
Where it comes from
In Zhengning, tofu is always on the table at New Year. The plant's manager quotes a saying handed down by older generations, "一口豆腐，一年兜福", which plays on the sound of doufu: one mouthful of tofu scoops up a year of good fortune.
The county government reports that Zhengning Old Tofu has appeared on the CCTV programme Meili Zhongguo Cheng (魅力中国城) and that its making technique was entered on the Qingyang municipal intangible cultural heritage list in 2019. With vacuum packing and storage at zero degrees Celsius, the plant now keeps the tofu for 20 to 60 days, and Zhengning people living elsewhere order it online for their New Year's Eve dinner.
Questions before you order
Why do people in Zhengning eat Zhengning Tofu at New Year?
Tofu is a fixed part of the Zhengning New Year table, and a local saying plays on its name: one mouthful of tofu scoops up a year of good fortune.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.