MUZIChinese Matrix
Soy Milk and Yuba · FFET10124
Soy milk set soft with gypsum or brine, with salty gravy in the north and sweet syrup in the south.
A white porcelain bowl holds soft white tofu pudding under a dark brown savory gravy with minced pork, day lily and wood ear, topped with chopped cilantro and scallion.
Soy milk, and yuba and bean-curd sticks made from it.
Tofu pudding is soy milk set into a soft curd with a coagulant and eaten with a spoon, softer than the douhua that can be picked up with chopsticks, and common at breakfast and snack stalls. In the north, including Beijing and Tianjin, it usually comes with a salty gravy thickened with starch; Guangdong, Hong Kong and the south favor sugar or ginger syrup, while Sichuan leans spicy. No definite place or year of origin was found; among the earlier dated records found is Fu Chongju's Chengdu Tonglan (1909), describing 3 kinds of tofu pudding sold from carrying poles on Chengdu's streets.
Tofu pudding is soy milk set into a soft curd with a coagulant (gypsum, brine or glucono-delta-lactone) and eaten with a spoon; the slightly firmer kind that chopsticks can pick up is called douhua. It is eaten as breakfast or a snack with a salty gravy or a sweet syrup.1,7
No accepted year of origin was found. Legend credits tofu itself to Liu An of the Han dynasty, a claim scholars doubt. Among the earlier dated records found is Chengdu Tonglan (1909), describing 3 kinds of tofu pudding sold from carrying poles on Chengdu's streets.1,2
It is eaten differently in different places: Beijing and Tianjin usually have a thick salty gravy, Guangdong and Hong Kong a sweet sugar or ginger syrup, Sichuan and Chongqing lean spicy, and Hubei has both.1,3,4,8,9
Soybeans are soaked for 4 to 8 hours, ground, strained, boiled and cooled to about 80 degrees Celsius, then set with a small amount of coagulant and left for 5 to 15 minutes. A northern home recipe adds a gravy of ground pork, dried day lily, wood ear and shiitake thickened with starch; the southern style adds ginger syrup, with a home recipe using 400 ml of soy milk and 2 g of gypsum, steamed for 10 minutes.1,6,7
The sweet kind is treated as a liquid food with sugar or honey, eaten hot in winter and cold in summer. The north-south quarrel over sweet or salty became a popular topic on Weibo in 2011.1,3
A 2017 account records over 160,000 views and comments on Weibo in 2 days during the 2011 sweet-or-salty debate. Hong Kong's Kung Wo Beancurd Factory appears in the Michelin Guide's 2022 Bib Gourmand recommendations, with its douhua mentioned in the entry.3,9
Legend has it that when Liu An, the Han-dynasty Prince of Huainan, was making elixirs, soy milk met gypsum or brine and set into a curd, and that is how tofu came about, and later soft forms such as tofu pudding.
Told in: A legend told around Bagongshan in Huainan, Anhui, and repeated in tofu stories across China. Chinese Wikipedia and a 2020 article from The Paper both say scholars doubt it; it explains the origin of tofu and is not specific to tofu pudding.
Grandma Li
This is a simplified home version, not the traditional restaurant method.
This is how I make tofu pudding at home, simplified: I use store-bought unsweetened soy milk and food-grade gypsum powder to steam a soft base, then pour on either a sweet ginger syrup or a salty ground-pork gravy as I like. The base and the ginger syrup follow the amounts of one home recipe, with 3.5 g of gypsum for every 400 ml of store-bought soy milk; for the gravy I scaled another recipe down to about 100 g of pork, and how much water and oil to add is my own choice at home.
Allergens: soy, wheat
Grandpa Li
Picks come from public lists and guides and were checked on the dates shown; places can change, so confirm before you go.
Beijing, Dongcheng District
Order: Tofu pudding (thick gravy with shiitake, wood ear and day lily)
This shop is listed in a Beijing article on breakfast spots from June 2025, which describes its tofu pudding as having a thick gravy with shiitake, wood ear and day lily. If you want to taste the northern salty kind, this is where I would start.
Checked on 2026-11-02
Hong Kong, Sham Shui Po
Order: Douhua with brown sugar
A 2026 feature from Hong Kong describes this shop as still making soy foods in Sham Shui Po and serving douhua with brown sugar, and the Michelin Guide's 2022 entry lists it among its Bib Gourmand recommendations. If you want to taste the sweet kind, you can go here.
Checked on 2026-11-02
