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this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2024
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Traditionally there's meat in the fermentation brine to impart flavour but can and is often substituted for mushrooms these days.
what kind of stinky tofu are you talking about? the changsha black style? because most other types aren't marinated in some sticky goop before, it's just fermented tofu, and when you buy it fresh it's just regular blocks of tofu, only stinky.
Not only that, the Zhejiang style fermentation liquid traditionally contained {虾皮|xiā pí} shrimp to impart salt and umami flavours, a role that has been largely replaced by mushrooms and/or MSG.
Here's the only English language source I could find for a traditional ingredient list. I'm sure some old family restaurant still uses the old old method but you're unlikely to purchase it by accident in a city street.
i often get stinky tofu from 素食 places and i'd suppose they as well as non-veg vendors source it from the same place.
i'm not very familiar with zhejiang-style, and while i've eaten kilos of changsha-style, most of it has been the cheapest type of street food, mass produced, and i can't imagine they would use expensive ingredients like meat just to marinate a 6-kuai street food (or ever stranger, milk, liquid milk being a specialty drink you have to go to like a walmart to buy)
though when i visited changsha, the stinky tofu they served there sometimes was topped with mince. wtf.
guizhou/yunnan types on the other hand seem like descended from 毛豆腐 rather than something fermented in some animalesque brine. they're wet/sticky on the inside (before cooking) and seem to be just fermented tofu, not soaked/marinated.
taiwanese style is mostly vegan, but sometimes they make a disgusting soup out of intestines and stinky tofu, which is actually properly stinky because it smells like literal shit, while the tofu itself normally is just a bit cheesy
regards, a tofu enjoyer
This goes back to my previous point that traditionally it may not be vegan. The thing about our diversity of culture and climate is that different locations may specialise or adapt a food item to their needs.
If your humidity/temperature of your region don't allow you to successfully ferment tofu safely and consistently every time before electricity, would a brine not be the logical solution? And for some coastal regions in the days before MSG, wouldn't adding dried shrimp (a shelf stable ingredient) to enrich the brine make sense?
Culture is another part of it. I didn't grow up with milk as a common ingredient, but it may be different for other Chinese. Tibetans would probably have (yak) milk on a daily or almost daily basis, Tibetan and Tibet adjacent Chinese may very well have add milk to foods long before Walmart ever existed. Hell, maybe since before The United States of America ever existed. I don't know enough about western Chinese cooking tbh.
But in modernity, adding animal products makes less sense. You're no longer just supplying your village, your product is potentially going to reach Uyghurs, Hui, devout Buddhists, overseas Chinese, etc. Why would you add shrimp skin to the 卤水 brine when MSG is cheaper, halal, vegetarian and doesn't hamstring your export potential? Why brine it at all if temperature and humidity control is trivial in the 21st century?
The light fermented / flavored kind also usually uses milk and meat as part of its flavor. The broth it is marinated in is light and opaque.