Taizhou Shredded Tofu 泰州干丝
Taizhou Shredded Tofu is featured among the local specialties of Jiangsu.
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Taizhou Shredded Tofu (泰州干丝) is pressed tofu cut into hair-fine shreds, the core item of Taizhou (泰州) morning tea (早茶). Taizhou Daily and Yangtse Evening News both give it more than 200 years of history. The making technique entered Taizhou's second municipal list of intangible cultural heritage in 2008 and is now a Jiangsu provincial heritage item.
How it is made
For the scalded version (烫干丝), the starting point is a block of pressed tofu peculiar to Taizhou, made from soybeans of the Lixiahe (里下河) area and described as being as thick as a novella; cooks use it rather than thin tofu sheets. With a crescent-bladed knife (月牙刀) the cook slices it horizontally into more than 20 even layers, thin enough to read a newspaper through. Locals call this horizontal cut 'piao' (飘). The slices are then laid out at a slant and cut into shreds as fine as hair.
Next comes the scalding. The shreds are boiled with a vat of hot alkaline water beside the pot, and the ratio of water to alkali changes with the season. This step is called 'tijian' (提碱): too little and the shreds stay soft outside but hard inside, too much and they fall apart in the pot. The shreds are usually passed through boiling water three times.
How it is eaten
The scalded version is served on a white plate: white shreds topped with golden shreds of ginger and a pinch of dried shrimp, then soybean soy sauce and small-mill sesame oil poured over. It is also called Taizhou five-flavour shreds (五味干丝); early versions had five main toppings: jellied pork (肴肉), coriander, preserved mustard tuber (榨菜), shiitake and ginger. The ginger is young ginger picked in early autumn, mildly hot and sweet, set against the soft, smooth shreds.
Where it comes from
A story retold in Yangtse Evening News traces the scalded version to Zhezheju (者者居), a vegetarian eatery near the city's east gate in the late Qing, where a cook surnamed Peng, formerly the private cook of a salt merchant, sold it at the teahouse morning market. In December 2025, at the centenary of Haitangchun (海棠春), a noted Taizhou morning-tea house, one hundred Taizhou shredded-tofu cooks, aged from 10 to 85, hand-cut a thousand jin (斤) of shreds together in half an hour.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and fact-checked against them on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.