Fried tofu stuffed with rice

Have you ever made yubuchobap? It’s fried and marinated tofu stuffed with seasoned rice. The tofu tastes sweet, soft, and juicy, and the rice is vinegared: it’s a very unique combination, and even a little meaty! It’s very simple to make, and very popular in Korea. We usually make yubuchopbap from inexpensive readymade kits, but the real key to this dish is the properly-made fluffy rice with firm yet pliant grains.

I originally posted this recipe in 2010, but I decided to remake the video this year because of an important discovery I made!

I found that using my 1 tablespoon cookie dough scoop to make rice balls to fill the pockets is much easier, simpler, cleaner, and faster than the conventional method of squeezing rice with my hands. Ever since I discovered this, I make yubuchobap very often and I really wanted to share this with you.

Yubuchobap makes for a great lunch menu, especially when paired with something like a salad. Now that springtime is here, it’s something quick you can make for a picnic on a sunny day. Enjoy the recipe and let me know if you try it!

Ingredients (1 or 2 servings)

• 1 small yubuchobap kit (with 14 triangle pieces inside)
• 2 cups of cooked rice (about 10 ounces: 300 grams), made from 1 cup of rice

Directions

Prepare everything

1. Open the yubuchobap kit and find 3 packets: a packet of seasoned tofu (aka yubu), a packet of dried ingredients, and a packet of vinegared sauce.
2. Put the warm rice into a large shallow bowl. Mix in the packet of vinegared sauce little by little until it gets how you like it. A full packet is often too strong for me, I often use three-quarters of it.
3. Open the packet of seasoned tofu and squeeze out any excess liquid. Take out the tofu pieces one by one and open them up. Put them on a platter.
4. Open the mix of dried ingredients and put them on another corner of the platter.

Make yubuchobap

1. Make a rice ball with a cookie dough scoop and put it in a tofu pouch. If you don’t have a cookie dough scoop, just use your hands by forming about 2 tablespoons of rice into a slightly oval ball, then put it into a tofu pouch. Fill the pouch so much that it can’t close, and the pouch opening exposes the rice inside.
2. Dip the exposed rice into the dried ingredients, and put the yubuchobap on a plate. Repeat it with a rest of tofu pockets until all of them are full of rice and seasoned.

Serve

1. Serve right away or put them into your lunch box. It’ll be safe to eat up to several hours at room temperature.

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