Tofu Piccata (Yes, you read that correctly)

For those of you who don’t know, I love meat. Variety is the key to my diet and this extends to my protein sources. Since I do all of the dinner planning at home, if not all of the cooking, I make sure that we have a different protein source every night. There’s no way we will have chicken two nights in a row. I just won’t allow it! Ok, so maybe occasionally it happens but let me assure you it is a rare occurrence.

Wanting to broaden my protein source horizons, I decided to go vegetarian for about a month and a half. I’m on week 2, I think. While it has been sad to still be planning meat-filled meals for the rest of my family knowing that I won’t get to taste their dinners, I’ve been managing quite fine without chicken, pork, beef, turkey, veal, lamb, etc etc etc. I chose to give up fish as well making dining out very difficult. Would you believe that Applebee’s does not have any straight up vegetarian meals on their menu? I had to order a subpar broccoli and fettuccine alfredo sans the chicken.

After turning down an invitation to a steakhouse, which I felt sorry about but honestly the only vegetarian thing the restaurant had on its menu were overpriced vegetables, I opted for drinks with some friends at the 99. Deciding I wanted something substantial to go with my awesome $4 margarita (!!!), I took a gander at the menu but couldn’t find anything to order from the entrees section and had to opt for fried cheese sticks from the appetizers.  

I’ve become very indignant on the behalf of vegetarians trying to dine out with friends as a result.

Anyway, to the food, this was my first foray into tofu as the main attraction. I did some looking around for recipes that I could start with but grew irritated with the ongoing Asian theme. As much as I love Asian cuisine, I wanted something different since I’ve had quite of bit of Asian fare since going meatless. Not finding anything, I decided to make something up!

You don’t see Italian and tofu together often; do you? I did some searching and turned up nothing for Tofu Piccata so that’s what I chose to make. I think our favorite Chicken Piccata recipe is Giada de Laurentiis’s recipe which can be found here so I began there and started making some adjustments to her recipe to make it vegetarian.

The chicken was obviously the first thing to go but I nearly missed the addition of chicken stock when I was revising. Giada’s recipe calls for ½ a cup of stock so I replaced it with a dry white wine that wasn’t included in her recipe but does feature in other piccata sauces. I selected an extra firm tofu and sliced it into about ¼ inch slices and dredged them in flour after pressing out as much water as I could. (Honestly, I think pressing the tofu was the hardest part). Then I pan fried them in a little bit of butter and olive oil and removed from the pan to make the sauce.

Taking fresh lemon juice and capers, I combined them in the pan with pinot grigio. (I used Black Swan’s pinot because it’s smooth and crisp AND it was on sale. So use whichever dry white wine you prefer.)  Once I added the tofu back to the pan after the sauce came to a boil, I quickly realized that the absorbent nature of tofu was making fast work of my sauce. I added a touch of vegetable stock to save the day.

Once plated and garnished with parsley alongside some multi-grain penne, I took my pictures (a little impatiently) and then tried out my creation. There are many words that could describe that first bite but I think delightful is the best. :) I may even go so far as to say that it is better than chicken piccata. (Yeah, I went there. Rob says I’m ballsy.) 

Taken with my phone so the image quality isn't as good.
But I wasn't going to get my camera back out once I started eating.

When you have chicken piccata, the sauce sits on top of the chicken but let me tell you about tofu piccata! Remember how I said the sauce was absorbed by the tofu when I returned it to the pan? Ooooo weeee! Piccata flavor absolutely permeates every bite of the tofu making it completely delectable.

I’m going to have let some of you down and withhold the recipe for now since I want to do some tweaking. I definitely need to make more of the sauce since so much of it gets sucked up into the tofu and I may even skip the dredging of the tofu in flour since its probably an unnecessary relic of the original chicken piccata recipe. As soon as I have adjusted it to my liking, I will be sure to post the full recipe with instructions!