LEMON MARINATED TOFU PAKORAS

Today I come to you with a very tasty Tofu Pakora to chase away those evening blues.I had never prepared any dishes with Tofu before. It was totally new to me. And I had heard that Tofu had a totally bland taste with absolutely no flavour. So I had never attempted to buy Tofu from the Supermarkets here, though it was available here in abundance because Tofu dishes had a regular place here in the everyday Malay cuisines. But yesterday when my husband brought Tofu home from the local markets yesterday, I was skeptical…But I had seen this particular recipe from one of my fellow blogger Prachi’s space – Divine Spice Box. From the time I saw this post and read the recipe, my mouth was watering. So I decided to make these Lemon Marinated  Tofu Pakoras. The name itself makes you drool right! And today seemed to be the perfect time with the slight drizzling rain outside ,to prepare these Pakoras.

I was initially a bit doubtful whether the Tofus would absorb the flavours of the Marinade.But one bite of these Pakoras made me realise how wrong I was.These were so flavourful,the marinade worked really well on the Tofu and the lemony twist these pakoras had, was out of the world!!

So since my first attempt with Tofu was a success, you can expect more Tofu recipes coming up.I have bookmarked a few recipes from my bloggers’s blogs.This is the first one .

Recipe adapted from Prachi’s Blog , Divine Spice Box ,verbatim.

Ingredients:

• 100 gms Tofu – Firm/Extra firm – cut into cubes/sticks (as per your choice)
• Oil for shallow frying

Marination

• Juice of 1 big lemon or 2 small lemons
• 1 tablespoon water
• Salt as per taste
• Red chili powder as per taste
• Black pepper as per taste
• 1 tsp chaat masala (optional)

Batter

• 1/2 cup chickpea flour
• 1/4 cup water or as per desired consistency of the batter
• salt to taste
• red chili powder to taste
• 1/2 tsp ginger, minced
• 1/2 tsp garam masala
• 1/2 tsp dry mango powder/ 1/2 tsp fresh raw mango, grated(I didnt have both,so i used 1 tbsp of lime juice 🙂 )

Method

1. Begin with marinating the tofu slices. Try to squeeze out all the water from the tofu slices before marination
2. In a bowl, add in all the ingredients of marination and mix well. To this, add in the tofu slices and mix well so that the marination is coated well on both the sides. Let this rest for 15 minutes. Switch the sides of the tofu in between so that tofu is marinated from all sides.
3. Now, in a separate bowl, prepare the batter with the ingredients mentioned above. For this recipe, i chose to make a thick coating batter so that it is easier to coat the tofu slices evenly.
4. Shallow fry the batter coated tofu slices in oil till golden brown.
5. Serve hot.