Tim Chin is a professional cook and writer who has contributed to Serious Eats and America’s Test Kitchen. A graduate of The International Culinary Center, Tim has cooked at restaurants in New York and Boston, working at Rouge Tomate, Northern Spy, and BiSq.

Tim Chin

Yuba—aka fu pei, tofu skin, or bean curd skin—is the foundation of several classic dishes throughout Asia, from Cantonese dim sum like fried bean curd skin rolls to the more elemental presentations of Japanese Buddhist cooking, like yuba braised in dashi. Yuba can be eaten fresh, fried, boiled, and even dried. The process for making yuba is relatively straightforward but requires a lot of technique and patience. Soy milk is heated until a “skin”—a creamy yellow, protein-lipid film that’s produced through a combination of protein coagulation and drying—forms on the surface. The thin tofu skin is carefully harvested repeatedly using a long bamboo skewer or dowel, and it’s either eaten immediately or hung to air-dry for longer-term storage.These days, most people get their yuba at the store, where it’s sold as semi-dry sheets, dried sticks, or as dried chips. And while you can’t beat that kind of convenience, the flavor of store-bought yuba pales in comparison to freshly made yuba, particularly yuba made from fresh soy milk made with good soybeans.Yuba makers use giant steam tables to heat large pans of soy milk, harvesting four to eight giant sheets at a time. Since the optimal temperature for film-forming is relatively low (it starts at [c 80] and maxes out at around [c 88]), the gentle heat from these steam tables is ideal. When making yuba at home, the best cooking method is also the simplest: Heat soy milk in a large nonstick skillet—the larger, the better—over direct heat until a skin forms, then carefully remove the yuba sheet with a wooden dowel and hang it to dry. Unlike more unwieldy techniques involving double boilers and steaming in hotel or sheet pans, this method allows you to reasonably control the temperature within a range, and the nonstick coating makes it easy to harvest sheets that form on the surface, as well as scrape off and remove any excess coagulated soy milk (called “amayuba,” or sweet yuba) from the bottom of the pan throughout the process.Beyond the little details, the key to this recipe is time. This process takes hours and can take a whole day if you’re trying to make a substantial quantity of yuba. But for the patient, the payoff is yuba that tastes better, is more aromatic, and silkier than any you could buy in a store.

How to Make Fresh Yuba