The northern city of Baoding doesn’t really have a lot to recommend it as a place to visit. Located southwest of Beijing, the city was once the capital of Zhili province, today’s Hebei. After the capital moved to Tianjin, Baoding sort of fell rapidly in importance. Today the city has a small historic center surrounded by a ring of decaying industry, a sprawling university campus, and row after row of concrete tower blocks.
But Baoding was once the place to be, a crossroads where new Qing officials would stop to get acclimated before going to take up positions in the capital. Back in the day, Baoding attracted powerful people from all over the country.
With all of this traffic, Baoding developed its own unique variations of north China’s meaty, wheat-based local cuisine. While ordinary townsfolk ate hearty street foods like dense wheat buns stuffed with braised donkey meat, elite kitchens used expensive ingredients like dried seafood to adapt northern tastes into more refined dishes. Baoding’s most famous dish is the simple but elegant Governor’s Tofu, named in honor of after Li Hongzhang, nineteenth-century statesman and long serving governor of Zhili,
Governor’s Tofu 总督豆腐
This dish is best made with egg tofu, but ordinary tofu would also work.
Cut tofu into 2 cm cubes and deep fry at medium high heat, stirring gently to keep pieces separate. Remove when outside is firm and golden.
Fry ginger, garlic and onion whites, add oyster sauce, abalone sauce, chicken concentrate, sugar, cooking wine and a bit of starch water. Thicken, fish out the aromatics, add the cooked tofu and braise lightly.
Finish the dish with a few drops of sesame oil and plate.
Note: Don’t fancy working with a giant wok full of hot oil? Go ahead and swap the deep frying for pan frying the tofu with a light starch coating. You’ll lose the unqiue texture of the dish, but save yourself a lot of trouble.
Variations on this dish include enhancing the texture with dried shrimp or shredded abalone. I’ve even seen people add ketchup for color. But more notable is what it doesn’t have. No starch or coating of any kind on the fried tofu (see below). No soy sauce or bean paste. Instead, the dish relies entirely on the more refined and more expensive taste of concentrated shellfish. It might look like any other dish of braised tofu, but Governor’s tofu is an unmistakable upgrade of the northern palate.
Thomas David DuBois 