This past weekend, I had a couple blocks of tofu in the fridge that I needed to use up. Instead of doing the usual stir fry or whatever, I decided to try making tofu ricotta, because I had all the other makings of baked ziti. I didn’t have especially high expectations for the final result, but I’m here to say definitively that even if you’re not a hippie herbivore like me, tofu ricotta is the move for pasta bakes.
Tofu ricotta is simple to make. I used this recipe but converted it up to the 18 oz block of tofu I had instead of the 10 oz in the recipe. All you do is whizz up a block of tofu into a paste in a blender or food processor, with lemon juice, nutritional yeast, and salt. I have a tofu press that I used to nicely drain the tofu first, but you can do this without draining the tofu as thoroughly as me. I actually added a splash of water back into the mix to get it to the right consistency.
Once I blended up the “ricotta,” things started to look promising. It was super thick and creamy and smooth, unlike dairy ricotta which depending on the kind you get can sometimes be thin, watery and gritty.
The rest of the assembly for this was pretty straightforward. I sauteed some onions, mushrooms & garlic in a skillet, then added a jar of pasta sauce and simmered a bag of Trader Joe’s meatless meatballs in the sauce, while I cooked my Severino hemp ziti in another pot (har har).
After draining the pasta, I removed the cooked meatlessballs from the sauce and sliced them in half. I combined the “ricotta” and sauce, then mixed that mixture up with the pasta, and as a final step folded in the meatlessballs so as to not mash them up. Into the oven for 20 minutes at 350°F, then finished with microplane-grated Violife vegan parm and back into the oven for another 10 minutes.
Now, I’m not bullshitting you when I say this: the tofu ricotta produced a far superior pasta bake than I ever achieved with dairy ricotta. It did a much better job of both providing creaminess, and holding the pasta together. The flavor is close enough to dairy ricotta that when combined with tomato sauce, you’d have no idea it was tofu. It just tastes good.
On top of just being culinarily better in this particular use case, there’s a lot less fat in tofu than ricotta. Per 100 gram serving, ricotta has 13g fat, 11g protein, and 174 calories. 100 grams of tofu has 5g fat, 8g protein, and 76 calories. So not only will a pasta bake made with tofu ricotta have significantly better texture and structural integrity than one made with dairy ricotta, you can feel slightly less guilty about gluttonously shoving a big block of it into your face hole.
