Recipe for My Mom’s Japanese-Style Mapo Tofu from ‘The Wok’

By The Associated Press

J. Kenji López-Alt has written a new cookbook with handy tips, fascinating asides and some 200 dishes all related to the wok. One recipe in “The Wok” is for a version of mapo tofu that is similar to what he ate growing up. Instead of plain ground beef his mom would use the dish as an opportunity to use up leftover dumpling filling. Unlike the numbingly hot Sichuan version, this one is savory and sweet, with the classic Japanese flavors of soy, sake and mirin, and comes together even faster, if you can believe it.