“Crab Roe” Tofu | Genshin Impact

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“Crab Roe” Tofu

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Ingredients

  

• 4 Salted Egg Yolks
• 1 block Silken Tofu (other tofu also work)
• 1 tsp Minced Ginger
• 250 ml Water or more as required
• Spring Onion Garnish
• Cornstarch slurry 1 tbsp cornstarch + 1 tbsp water

Instructions

 

• Separate out the egg yolks from salted eggs.
• Steam egg yolks for 10 minutes.
• Cube tofu and boil for 10 minutes.
• Mash egg yolks.
• In a pan, add cooking oil and saute minced ginger for 10 seconds.
• Cook the mashed egg yolks until it starts bubbling.
• Add water, and braise the tofu in the salted egg yolk sauce for 10 minutes.
• Cornstarch slurry in to thicken the sauce.
• Serve with spring onion as garnish.

The above is pretty basic. You can use chicken stock instead of water. Or add salt and other ingredients like ham, peas, crab meat, or whatever you like really. Or even… actual crab roe for the original non-budget version.

Wait, where’s the Crab Roe?

Like many of Genshin Impact’s Liyue cuisine, Crab Roe Tofu is a dish found in Beijing Cuisine. Though, this dish isn’t quite as well known, seeing as it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. 

And really, there’s not much of a story behind the dish; it is a simple dish cooked in the countryside where tofu is a very common ingredient for side dishes. Crabs are abundant particularly around September to October each year, so it is natural that these two are combined to form the dish. 

As crabs started becoming more of a luxury, salted duck egg yolks became an acceptable substitute, with even lower-end restaurants using salted duck egg yolks cooked in grease from crab roe as a cost-cutting measure. Searching online,  “蟹黄豆腐” (Crab Roe Tofu) also yields many recipes using salted duck egg yolks, acknowledging that crabs are rather expensive and quite a pain to cook with.

Logically speaking, it’d be less confusing for everyone if it were simply named “Salted Egg Yolk Tofu”, but I guess we’ll have to make do with being confused for now. Just remember that real Crab Roe Tofu does actually use Crab Roe, like in this other recipe.  

But uh, since Yanfei’s Crab Roe tofu is “faithfully rendered according to the ‘Crab Roe Tofu Laws'”, perhaps more than a few of you out there might find the salted egg yolk version very objectionable. 

Additional Credits:
Yanfei theme by tnbee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgBv3k2Jbq0
Yanfei art by mmlyno_ https://www.reddit.com/r/Genshin_Impact/comments/n3ueqa/objection_yanfei_fanart/