Douhua 豆花 — also called doufunao 豆腐脑, “tofu brain,” and sold in English as tofu pudding — is tofu caught before it is tofu. Soy milk is set with a coagulant and eaten at the moment it curdles, before any of it is pressed. It is too soft for chopsticks. It comes sweet in some places and savory in others, and both are old.
Douhua, Doufunao, Laodoufu, Silken Tofu
These four get run together constantly, including by the answer boxes.
| What it is | How it behaves | |
|---|---|---|
| Douhua 豆花 / Doufunao 豆腐脑 | Fresh curds, never pressed, eaten from the pot | Will not hold its shape; eaten with a spoon |
| Laodoufu 老豆腐 | The same curd set firmer and coarser | Holds together better; a separate thing with its own name |
| Silken tofu | Soy milk set in its final box and sold as a block | Cuts into cubes, survives shipping, sits on a shelf |
| Block tofu | Curds pressed in a cloth-lined mould until the whey runs out | Firm enough to fry, braise and cube |
The line people most often want is the one between douhua and silken tofu. Silken tofu is set in the container it is sold in, and is firm enough to lift out and cut; douhua is scooped out of the pot while it is still trembling, and is not.
A writer who grew up in Beijing put the distinction in one sentence, setting douhua against both the southwestern version and laodoufu:
北平的”豆腐脑”，异于川湘的豆花，是哆里哆嗦的软嫩豆腐，上面浇一勺卤，再加蒜泥。
“老豆腐”另是一种东西，是把豆腐煮出了蜂窠，加芝麻酱韭菜末辣椒等佐料，热乎乎的连吃带喝亦颇有味。
“Beiping’s ‘doufunao’ is not the same as the douhua of Sichuan and Hunan: it is wobbling, tender tofu, with a ladle of gravy poured over it and mashed garlic added. ‘Laodoufu’ is a different thing again — tofu cooked until it goes honeycombed, dressed with sesame paste, chopped chives and chilli; hot, and good to eat and drink at once.”
One more thing this page does not cover: the sweet version eaten across parts of southern China and Southeast Asia, with ginger syrup, sago or taro. The English word covers it, and it is a real tradition. We have no primary material for it, so we are not going to write about it here.
It Is Tofu, Caught Before the Press
The clearest description of what douhua is comes from describing how tofu is made and stopping halfway. Beans are soaked, ground, strained, and the milk is boiled; then comes the step that decides everything:
滚开稍定后，滴入一点盐卤，或加入一点石膏，这是重要的分离剂，一会儿，一朵朵像白云般的豆腐脑就凝结起来，漂浮在淡黄色清浆中，把这些捞出来，倒在垫好淋布的模子中，稍待片刻，去掉模子，便是一方嫩豆腐了。
“Once it has come to a full boil and settled a little, a few drops of bittern go in, or a little gypsum — this is the important separating agent — and in a moment the doufunao congeals in clouds, like white clouds, floating in the pale yellow whey. These are scooped out and tipped into a mould lined with draining cloth; a short wait, the mould comes off, and there is a block of tender tofu.”
Read that again and notice where douhua sits. It is in the sentence before the mould. Everything after the scooping — the cloth, the mould, the waiting, the weight — is what turns it into tofu. Skip those steps and ladle it into a bowl instead, and it is douhua.
Which is why the coagulant matters more here than in any other soy dish: there is nothing to press the texture into shape afterwards. Gypsum and bittern are the two traditional ones, and they give different results.
Sweet or Savory Is Not a Real Argument
In English this is the fight: is douhua a dessert or is it breakfast? The usual framing is that the south eats it sweet, the north eats it savory, and the two camps disagree.
Here is a street-food price list from Chengdu, surveyed in 1909. Three entries, consecutive:
糖豆腐脑 肩挑者，石膏造成，二文。
熬醋豆腐脑 肩挑者，每碗二文。
相料馓子豆腐脑 肩挑者，四文。
“Sugar doufunao: carried on a shoulder pole, made with gypsum, two cash. Vinegar-stewed doufunao: carried on a shoulder pole, two cash a bowl. Seasoned doufunao with sanzi: carried on a shoulder pole, four cash.”
Sweet, sour and seasoned, in one city, on one page, in the same year, all three sold off a pole. The sugar one even tells you the coagulant. The third has sanzi — brittle fried dough strands — crumbled into it, and costs double the other two.
So the argument is not between regions holding incompatible positions. It is a list of options that was already a list of options in 1909. A Beijing writer put the same point more broadly:
中国各地有好多地方都会做豆腐脑，有甜有咸，有荤有素，但是所谓荤的，也不过是有点儿榨菜干虾米，就是四川豆花也不过加上了臊子而已。
“Many places in China make doufunao — sweet and salty, with meat and without. Though ‘with meat’ means no more than a little pickled mustard stem and dried shrimp; and even Sichuan douhua only adds a meat sauce.”
Where It Was Sold
The same writer says where the stall stood, and it is the most useful line in this article for anyone trying to picture a Chinese breakfast street:
北平有一种肉片打卤的豆腐脑，这种卖豆腐脑的，每天清早多半找个卖烧饼油条摊子旁边一摆，配合着一块儿卖。
“Beiping had a doufunao with a sliced-pork gravy. The people selling it would mostly set up early each morning next to a stall selling shaobing and youtiao, and sell alongside it.”
That is the arrangement: the fried dough and the flatbread on one side, the soft curds on the other, and you assembled breakfast across two vendors. It also explains why douhua is sold in the morning and gone by mid-morning — it is made in a pot that gets emptied.
It was sold at the theatre too. Another Beijing writer, listing the snack stalls in the courtyard of an opera house, has it between the wonton pole and the tripe stall:
院子里都有几份卖小吃儿的，如馄饨挑、清真回回的豆腐脑儿、爆肚摊。
“In the courtyard there were several snack sellers: a wonton pole, the Muslim doufunao, a fried tripe stall.”
He also remembered one seller by name. The man worked a pitch at Bamiancao, in the east of the city, and everyone knew him by his nickname:
八面槽那位卖豆腐脑的姓周，因为他身躯矮小，为人随和又爱说笑，所以大家给他起了一个外号叫”恨天高”，他自己还挺得意呢。
“The man selling doufunao at Bamiancao was surnamed Zhou. Because he was short, and easy-going, and liked a joke, everyone gave him the nickname ‘Hates-How-High-The-Sky-Is’ — and he was rather pleased with it himself.”
恨天高就是深州人，原本在深州大街上卖豆腐脑，直奉之战他怕抓，就逃来北平重操旧业。他每天六点准出挑子摆在八面槽锡拉胡同口外，豆腐脑是用老卤点的，可不带一点卤味。
“He was from Shenzhou, and had sold doufunao on the main street there; during the Zhili–Fengtian war he was afraid of being pressed into the army, so he fled to Beiping and took up the same trade. Every day at six sharp he set his carrying pole down outside the mouth of Xila Hutong at Bamiancao. His doufunao was set with aged bittern, and carried not a trace of the bitter taste.”
他勾的肉片卤，两个小时要卖一百五六十碗，舀来舀去卤都不澥。
“The pork-slice gravy he thickened would sell a hundred and fifty or sixty bowls in two hours, and however much he ladled out of it, it never went thin.”
He also carried shaobing, and regulars ordered the two together — a bowl of douhua and two mati shaobing — the small “horseshoe” flatbread — split and stuffed with soy-cured pork. He insisted that his douhua had been better at home, because the well water in Shenzhou was heavier and sweeter than anything in Beijing.
The Liu An Story, and What We Could Not Find
Search for douhua in English and the answer panel will hand you an origin: Han dynasty records, invented by Prince Liu An.
We cannot show you those records, and we have looked.
The source usually given for the Liu An story is a sixteenth-century Chinese pharmacopoeia, which is said to state that the method of tofu began with Liu An of Huainan in the Han. That is a Ming author reporting a tradition about something more than a thousand six hundred years before his own lifetime. We have not read that passage in the original edition, so we do not quote it here, and we would not treat it as a Han record even if we had: it is a late statement about an early time, which is a different kind of evidence.
What we can report is a negative, from texts we did read. Liu An is a well-documented figure. He appears repeatedly in the standard histories — in the Shiji, in the Hanshu, in the Hou Hanshu — and in the Huainanzi, the compendium associated with his own court. We searched the texts of all four. Liu An is in them many times over. The word 豆腐 is not in them at all.
It is also worth noticing how the attribution travels in Chinese. One of the writers quoted above, in an essay on tofu, recalls a teacher in a 1940s Beijing classroom going off on a tangent about how fine Chinese tofu is and how it already has two thousand years of history —
……且已经有两千年的历史，据说是最初……一同升天的汉代淮南王刘安创造的。
“…and already has two thousand years of history, said to have been created in the first place by Liu An, prince of Huainan in the Han — the one who [in the legend, with his household, the dog and the hen] went up to heaven together.”
据说, “it is said.” The same writer passes on a tofu poem attributed to Zhu Xi with 据传, “it is handed down.” In Chinese the Liu An story travels marked as a story. In English it arrives as a date.
None of this is proof that he did not make tofu. Absence from four books is absence from four books. But it is the sort of thing worth knowing before you repeat a sentence that is being presented to you as a dated fact. If someone tells you tofu was invented by a named prince in a named dynasty, the thing to ask is which text says so, and when that text was written.
How Far Back the Name Goes
Tofu itself is old in the records. It is in the Southern Song street accounts, and what those accounts tell you is that it was cheap:
更有酒店兼卖血脏、豆腐羹、螺蛳、煎豆腐、蛤蜊肉之属，乃小辈去处。
“There are also wine shops that sell blood offal, tofu soup, river snails, fried tofu and clam meat — places for the lower sort.”
又有卖菜羹饭店，兼卖煎豆腐、煎鱼、煎鲞、烧菜、煎茄子，此等店肆乃下等人求食粗饱，往而市之矣。
“And there are vegetable-soup-and-rice shops that also sell fried tofu, fried fish, fried dried fish, cooked greens and fried aubergine; these are shops where poorer people go to fill themselves cheaply.”
A Yuan court dietary manual, around 1330, gives tofu one line under the entry for soybeans, and it is not a compliment:
大豆 味甘，平，无毒。……作豆腐即寒而动气。
“Soybean: sweet in flavour, neutral, not toxic… made into tofu it becomes cooling and stirs the qi.”
But that is all tofu, not douhua. For the word 豆腐脑 itself — the unpressed curds with their own name and their own price — the earliest occurrence we can put our hands on is the 1909 Chengdu list quoted above. The food is certainly older than the record; what we are reporting is where the record starts.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does douhua mean?
豆花 is “bean flower” and 豆腐脑 is “tofu brain” — both describe the look of it. The curds come up in soft clouds, and the name is a picture of that, not a recipe.
Is douhua the same as silken tofu?
No. Silken tofu is soy milk set inside the box it is sold in, firm enough to cut; douhua is the same curd lifted out of the pot before anything presses or packages it, too soft to pick up. You can approximate douhua with warmed silken tofu, and plenty of recipes do, but they are not the same thing.
What does douhua taste like?
Of very little, by itself — that is the point of it. It tastes of fresh soy and nothing else, and it is a carrier for whatever goes on top: sugar syrup, or a gravy with pork and wood ear, or chilli oil, vinegar and pickled vegetable.
What is doufunao?
The same food, under the name used across much of northern China. 豆腐脑 is more common in the north, 豆花 in the southwest. Laodoufu, “old tofu,” is a related but firmer thing with its own name.
Is douhua sweet or savory?
Both, and it has been both for as long as we can check. A 1909 survey of Chengdu street food lists a sugar version, a vinegar version and a seasoned version with fried dough in it, all sold on the same page, all from a shoulder pole.
Who invented tofu?
Nobody can show you. The name attached to it in English search results is Prince Liu An of the Han, but the source usually given for that is a sixteenth-century book, and Liu An appears many times in the Han histories without tofu appearing once. Treat it as a tradition, not a date.
Sources
The Chinese passages above are quoted from the editions named, in the characters those editions print.
- Fu Chongju 傅崇矩, Chengdu tonglan 成都通览 (1909) — the street-food price list, vol. 2, pp. 263 and 265. Checked line by line against the original edition.
- Wu Zimu 吴自牧, Meng liang lu 梦梁录 (Southern Song) — the wine shops and the vegetable-soup shops.
- Hu Sihui 忽思慧, Yinshan zhengyao 饮膳正要 (1330) — the soybean entry.
The following are recollections, written down decades after the events they describe:
- Liang Shiqiu 梁实秋, Yashe tan chi 雅舍谈吃 — on doufunao, Sichuan and Hunan douhua, and laodoufu.
- Tang Lusun 唐鲁孙 — on sweet and savory versions; and “Lingren nanwang de zaodian” 令人难忘的早点, on the seller at Bamiancao.
- Chen Hongnian 陈鸿年, Beiping fengwu 北平风物 — on the snack sellers in a theatre courtyard.
- Deng Yunxiang 邓云乡, Yunxiang hua shi 云乡话食, “Xiaocong ban doufu” 小葱拌豆腐 — on the coagulant and the moment the curds form, and on how the Liu An attribution is passed along.
Two notes on the quotations. In the Deng Yunxiang passage on Liu An, two characters in the clause we have elided are not legible enough in our copy for us to set them in type, so we have marked the gap rather than guess at it. And on the Liu An story more broadly: we have not read the sixteenth-century passage usually cited for it in its original edition, and we do not quote it. The negative check reported above was made against the texts of the Shiji 史记, Hanshu 汉书, Hou Hanshu 后汉书 and Huainanzi 淮南子.
For how we check a passage before it appears here, see our page on editorial method. The dated list of the earliest record we can check for each dish is on the earliest records page.