Sometimes people knock tea as “hot leaf water” and this is probably the closest thing to “hot leaf water” that there is. Also, I love it.

 

Here’s the thing about white tea: it is a delicate tea, one that should be brewed with lower temperature water and short brewing times. The flavor is incredibly delicate: slightly sweet, slightly full, and an aftertaste that made my brain immediately say, “oooh, fuzzy!”  

 

My brain does this sometimes with tastes: it confidently delivers up words to describe tastes that are absolutely do not describe things that other people recognize as tastes. I don’t know where those words come from, but they seem as obvious to me as words like “lemony” or “caramel.”

 

So I’m sitting here at my kitchen table. I wrote “fuzzy” down and stared at it. Then I shut my eyes and tasted the tea and tried to think about where the word fuzzy came from through deep association.

 

This tea is not, in any normal usage of the word, “fuzzy.” It’s a liquid. The liquid does not contain fuzz. I did not sense any textural issues that were different from hot leaf water. 

 

Nonetheless, there was something about the taste that instantly made a connection in my brain to the feeling of holding a stuffed animal and rubbing it against my cheek, the associated scent of something well-loved and soft and comfortable.

 

You will notice that this also does not describe a taste. That is not a taste.

 

The other association I came to was this: the flavor reminds me a little of the aftertaste of a perfectly sun-ripened peach. I don’t mean that first bite in, when juice gushes everywhere, or the incredible peach taste as you try to wipe liquid away before it drips onto your shirt. I mean the lingering taste in your mouth afterward, when you’re holding the pit and trying to figure out how to turn on the faucet to wash your hands with fingers already sticky with peach nectar and bits of peach fuzz.

 

That’s what this tea tastes like: not the taste of a peach, but the memory of one.

White Peony comes from the Nepal Tea Collective.

We briefly interrupt this newsletter with a link: some of you may remember my photo session last year with Chandra Wicke. That was attached to a book project that she is doing called the Happily Ever After Society: a project to interview and photograph romance authors as real people.

 

She has a kickstarter to bring this to life. The photos are gorgeous and if you love romance, please check this out.

Eggs used to top the list of cheap, easy to prepare proteins. They still are cheap relative to some proteins, but prices are getting higher and they’re becoming more and more scarce.

 

So we’ve crossed a tipping point in the United States: in many places, tofu is cheaper per gram of protein than eggs. Tofu also has the same amount of protein and only slightly less fat, giving it a similar mouth feel (depending on preparation), which means that it’s time to consider stretching out eggs with tofu as a financial (and possibly political) matter.

 

If you, like me, like a high protein breakfast in the morning but don’t like the price of eggs (or oligarchy or cartels), this recipe is for you.

 

This is NOT a total egg replacement recipe (although you can do that). It is an egg reduction recipe. This recipe also does not attempt to make the tofu itself taste or even really look like egg: you can google and find recipes that do that with black salt and turmeric, but I personally find that the taste becomes just a little uncanny valley for me. The closer tofu is to eggs, the more obvious it becomes that it’s not eggs.

 

This is a recipe to make the tofu taste good, and to use the fact that tofu has a similar mouthfeel to scrambled eggs to make this as seamless as possible.

 

 

1 or 2 servings of tofu, to taste, preferably as soft as you can get without being silken. You can use silken, but it just won’t feel quite right, either. If all you can get is the extra firm stuff, that’s fine, I’ll tell you how to prep it.

1 egg.

Little bit of oil/butter.

Seasonings: I use a pinch of MSG, a pinch of salt, pepper, and a smattering of dried herbs—if you want something easy, can I suggest Penzey’s Green Goddess blend? I buy it by the bagful and use it profligately.

Maybe cheese, if it so moves you. I’m horribly lactose intolerant and use cheese as a luxury, which means that I do this one out of every two days.

 

Step 1: Prep your tofu. If you have soft tofu, crumble it into bits. If you have a more firm tofu, you will want it to be even smaller. 

 

The best texture for firm tofu is if you slice it very thinly and then roughly chop it from there, or, failing that, mash it into tiny crumbs. If you have a mandoline and aren’t afraid to use it, go ahead and rough it up into ribbons and then chop it from there.

 

In general, the more firm your tofu, the smaller you should make the pieces for this dish. This hold true unless you are lazy and don’t mind having chunks of tofu in your scrambled egg that feel chewy and un-egglike, which is fine! This recipe supports laziness.

Caption: On the left, soft tofu, crumbled up; on the right, tofu in thin ribbons, ready to be chopped.

This is useful to like 1% of you, but the very best texture and mouthfeel for this dish actually comes from homemade tofu that you mostly didn’t press long enough when forming it into a brick—think like 13 minutes. It’s the kind where you take it out of the tofu press and it’s still wobbly through the cheese cloth as you’re going to put it in cold water and you think “whoops, impatience strikes again!” 

 

If you make tofu and end up with a brick that is slightly falling apart because you weren’t paying attention to how long you were pressing it? This is the dish for you.

 

Step 2: Preheat your pan and add just enough oil or butter to give a light coat to the bottom. (This will help you caramelize your tofu, but if your pan is non-stick enough and you don’t want it, then don’t do that).

 

Throw your tofu in the pan once your butter melts, and add your seasonings: a small pinch of salt, a small pinch of MSG, pepper, and whatever herbs and spices your heart desires (a big pinch of those).

 

If you don’t want to use MSG, you don’t have to, but MSG is delicious and the claims made against it are largely racist. Fry until tofu gets a little bit of golden caramelization. Taste the tofu at this stage to see if you like it. If you do, just put that in your back pocket and remember that you could just use this, and skip the egg altogether.

 

Step 3: Crack your egg over the top of the tofu, then break the yolk. If you really want to mix it outside the pan, you can, but I actually think having a non-uniform color of egg and white looks better here. Dump all the tofu that isn’t covered by the egg on top of the egg. If you like your eggs with cheese, and I do, even though milk hates my digestive system, now is a great time to add some shredded cheese.

Cook your egg and melt your cheese, and your scrambled egg cut with tofu is finished. You can just eat it like scrambled eggs, or dump it on top of avocado toast.

I’m not saying that the tofu will taste exactly like scrambled eggs, but especially if you’re using crumbled bits of soft tofu, and especially if you have added cheese, it is very hard to tell where the tofu starts and the eggs leave off—visually, textually, and taste wise.

 

Depending on how much tofu/cheese you use, this recipe will give you between 2 and 3 eggs worth or protein. The cheesy tofu-egg-avocado toast in the photo above has about 28 grams of protein.

Wide-spread disaster is bad for most of us, but if the last few years have shown anything, it is actually great for the extremely wealthy. 

 

At the most extreme end, there’s the Gigantic Billionaire problem. Elon Musk’s net worth in 2019 was 20 billion dollars. He has increased his wealth by $380 billion dollars in the last six years. Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth in 2019 was $84 billion. He increased his wealth by $170 billion to $254 billion today. Jeff Bezos was worth $115 billion in 2019; he is worth $242 billion today, an increase of $127 billion.

 

But if you want to understand how that happened on the small scale, we can talk about one specific disaster, and that disaster is eggs.

 

The United States has been dealing with a slow egg disaster over the same period of time. Avian flu has been attacking our egg-laying flocks, reducing supply and sending the cost of eggs skyrocketing.

 

So is that why our egg prices are so high? Kind of.

 

You see, we have another egg problem in the United States. It is ridiculous, but we have Egg Bros. Egg Oligarchs. A Big Egg problem. They actually call themselves “United Egg Producers” and they are not supposed to be fixing prices or engaging in price gouging, but they very obviously are.

 

In 2022, when egg prices went astronomically high, United Egg members reported something like a 2000% increase in net revenue. Cal-Maine (the largest producer of eggs in the US) reported a 700% increase in profits.

 

To put it mildly: this does not look like an industry facing disaster. This looks like an industry that is using the fact of a disaster to price gouge, and the fact that every major producer of eggs is acting in lock-step looks like an additional antitrust violation.

 

It would not be the first time. In 2024, United Egg members were found liable to the tune of $53 million for civil antitrust violations for working together to fix egg prices in the 2000s.

 

You see the problem here. The lawsuit finalized in 2024 was brought by other large companies with money (Kraft, Kellogg, and Nestle among others)—people who had the means to bring suit to recover. 

 

Everyone else who paid those illegally high prices in the mid-2000s? Well, United Egg gets to pocket the money. And it took decades for Kraft to get that money back.

 

Right now, United Egg is trying to make as much money off us as possible. Egg prices are in fact an oligarchy problem, and our government isn’t doing anything about it. The only thing I can see that we, as consumers, can do about this brazen and illegal action on their part is to reduce our egg consumption so that we hit them in the pocketbook after all.

 

Hence my humble offering. Fight Big Egg. Use tofu.

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