I don’t want this to be a competition — I eat meat — but put this stuff in tacos and no one will know the difference. You’ll have saved money and cooked a product with a lighter carbon footprint, no animal welfare issues and fewer health threats than any meat. That kind of proselytizing aside, try the dish and see whether you think it’s any good.

Image Credit... Evan Sung for The New York Times

I love silken tofu in soups and soupy stir-fries because it puffs and firms up a bit, becoming quite juicy and, if the other ingredients are right, quite delicious. But silken tofu has other properties very akin to cream. The chocolate tofu pudding I ran in these pages five years ago is among the most popular and surprising recipes I’ve ever developed. A more recent development, chocolate avocado mousse, is in my latest book, “The VB6 Cookbook” and, I think, equally successful.

But the best use for silken tofu is what you might call vegannaise, an egg-free mayo that takes five minutes. (I know, the recipe says 10, but that doesn’t allow for kitchen multitasking.) It’s a recipe that never fails and can be varied, say, by adding basil, in all the ways you’d vary real mayonnaise. (Eggs are nicely mimicked, too, when you scramble firm tofu with vegetables or grains. I wouldn’t say no one could tell the difference, but I will say this kind of scramble is easy and satisfying.)

A good meat substitute should at least occasionally offer some real chew, and one of the common complaints about tofu is that to make it chewy you have to process it somehow. (Of course, chicken breasts aren’t very pleasant in their raw state either.) Hence, we have the pressed tofu mentioned above, the new preflavored and even precooked products like grilled tofu or the long explanations and techniques for pressing and weighting tofu.