Tofu 101 | Taiwanese Bakery | Factoria, Bellevue, Washington, United States.
Name: Tofu 101
Type: Family own Taiwanese Bakery that offers simple and traditional Chinese “small-eats”.
Address: 12816 Factoria Boulevard Southeast, Bellevue, WA 98006
Phone: (425) 974-1144
I wouldn’t say Tofu 101 is a hidden secret since a lot of the Asian community in the area already knows about it. I know about their existence about early last year and my wife and I have been visiting them a lot whenever we want a traditional Chinese breakfast fix.
After moving to Seattle about 10 years ago, I still find it very hard to find a good real traditional Chinese breakfast in Seattle, you know, those very simple, home style, down-to-earth type. Of course we have a lot of Chinese breakfast availability these days in Seattle, especially dimsum restaurants, they are everywhere now. They are so popular now even my non-Chinese speaking friends can easily pronounce “Ha Gao” (虾饺) and “Siu Mai” (烧卖), the name of two of the most representative dishes in dimsum, with amazing accuracy.
The traditional Chinese breakfast I am talking about are those that we eat almost everyday growing up as an Asian kid – rice porridge, hot soy milk, Chinese doughnut, steam ban (han bao), grill ban to name a few.
Here comes Tofu 101, a small and simple Taiwanese bakery store that solve all the simple Chinese breakfast issues – for me at least, well in this case, simple Taiwanese breakfast (very similar and come from the same root). In Tofu 101, you can find everything that you need for a traditional, simple, down-to-earth, home style Chinese breakfast.
Now, let’s see what they offer inside!
The sign outside the door says fresh Tofu. They made their own tofu, which is very rare in the area. So I guess they are not playing around when they decided to use tofu as the main part of their name.
They have a functional kitchen inside and they make most of their food here in the store. Especially every Saturday, they make a lot of fresh breakfast item, which is what a home style Chinese breakfast should be – simple. You can’t beat the satisfaction you get from eating a fresh made Chinese doughnut completely soak with fresh hot soy milk, yum~
This is the hot food section, from here you can see different food items for sell such as steam ban (包子), Chinese doughnut (油条) and Zong Zi (粽子) – which I can’t find an accurate English translation for it. Google translate it to dumpling, which in my opinion is not accurate at all. To describe it, it is a big sticky rice ball that is wrap in leaf, usually bamboo leaf. There could be savory inside or not and it could be sweet or salty.
Steam ban! Or Han Bao as a lot of people call them today. In Chinese, it’s call bao zi (包子). It’s basically dough that was prepare in a certain way and steam to a like-bread state. There’s normally meat and vegetable inside, it is popular to have bean paste (red or black) inside as well, or it could be just bread all the way.
These steam bans are not those tiny-mini version you see in dimsum restaurant, these are the real full size steam ban, which are hard to come by, especially those that are made the right way and taste the right taste.
As a kid, we ate this for breakfast and whenever we are hungry. The taste of their steam ban did not really bring back all the memory from childhood, but they are probably the best one in the area. They offer a couple stuffing options, which is a plus. My personal favorite is the bamboo shoot/meat stuffing.
Now, this is not really a breakfast item. For us, this is like a snack item. When we were younger, we don’t eat potato chips, crackers or fruit-loop, french fries or anything like that. This is what we eat when are hungry and is between meal.
They are basically bake goods with stuffing inside. They offer two kind of stuffing here, the red bean paste stuffing and the curry stuffing.
Translating to English, they are again call dumpling, no surprise there. I can accept this being call dumpling better than others, at least the shape is kind of like dumpling. However, I personally believe it will be more accurate to call it biscuit for the texture is similar to it. So I will call it the Chinese Biscuit.
In Chinese they are call “Su” (酥), roughly mean crunchy, loose and soft. The red bean one is call “Hong Dou Su” (红豆酥), in which “Hong Dou” is red bean and the curry one is call “Jia Li Su” (咖喱酥) in which “Jia Li” is curry.
The curry stuffing is basically the main reason I come to Tofu 101 almost every weekend! I have not have the curry stuffed Chinese Biscuit since I was like 8 years old! Imagine my surprise discovering it here, I have not seen any other place carry it! If you do, please please let me know.
I can’t tell you the taste of the red bean stuffed Chinese biscuit, because how can I try anything else other than the curry stuffed Chinese biscuit? But I can tell you the taste of the curry stuffed one is to die for! But I could be bias since I have not have it for so long and missed it for so long, it could be the whole “bring-back-memory” factor that is messing with my head and taste butt. It’s like rediscovering a long lost puppy (no longer puppy obviously) after many years, so don’t take my word for it, just try it.
This is another one of my comfort food growing up – the Chinese egg tart or in Chinese, Dan Ta (蛋挞)! When we were young and stipends are tight, this is what we go for. The egg tart only goes for a couple cents each when we were kids. So after a long day doing whatever kids at that time do, we will empty our pockets, gather all the loose coins, send some one over to buy as many egg tarts the collected coins can buy, and have a good time chowing them down! What a childhood.
These are the same egg tart as the above one, just the fancier version. I think they call it the Portuguese Egg Tart.
During weekday, they mainly sell frozen and refrigerated items. They offer a lot of items from dumpling (again?) to urm …. dumpling, but the big one with sticky rice and bamboo leaf. There are a lot of items in between dumplings, just look at the almost pack freezer. Oh yes, they also carry the very delicious and essential Taiwanese/Chinese meat balls.
The different kind of dumplings they carry, my favorite of dumplings are always the lamb stuffed one.
At the refrigerated section, they carry a lot of the Taiwanese/Chinese “small-eats” items. I have not try a lot of them yet, but I will start soon and write all about it in my new food related blog (which is far from complete at this point).
Here they feature items such as “black fungus, bamboo, veggie shredded pork”, “dried tofu salad”, “beef honeycomb salad”, “spicy pork ear”, and “soy sauce boiled egg”. I am not sure about you, but man, I am hungry after seeing all these names :)
They also carry some of the popular house hold items – food related of course.
This is what we bought on this particular Saturday morning – from left to right (sort of) is grilled meat ban (烧肉饼), Chinese Doughnut (油条), Curry Stuffed Chinese Biscuit (咖喱酥), regular Egg Tart (蛋挞), and hot soy milk (热豆浆). This my friend, make for an amazing and heart felt breakfast.
I am ending this post with a specialty they offer: Fresh Grill Ban and Chinese Doughnut every Saturday. So if you want to try some very authentic and down-to-earth Chinese breakfast, stop by Tofu 101 and let me know if you enjoy this type of breakfast or not :)
/Lumaca Moderno
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