Restaurant crawlers have had a great couple of weeks — two new restaurants have opened in the city and over in Ocho Rios, our friends from Passage to India have something new simmering on the back burner.

Lent is also in the air and those veggy words are once again in circulation. Yes those words, totally alien to those of us still in love with the animal kingdom.

Tofu and gluten and with two Asian restaurants and a refurbished Queen of Sheba at 65 Hope Road we’re forced to reckon with them.

To break our readers in gently, we flew over to Negril on Sunday and spent the day at the most bohemian chic endroit quite aptly called Idle Awhile. Vegetarian consultant Yvonne Hope is responsible for the veggy additions to this hotel’s menu and judging from the taste of our lunch, which was comprise of brown stewed tofu and curried gluten, her student Rudolph McIntosh has paid keen attention.

Rudolph has been in the service industry for many years. His love for food preparation started whilst a youngster. With both parents working, he would prepare the meals for his family.

His mother, he says, taught him to cook. His culinary journey continued, with stops at Hedonism, Swept Away, Paradise View, Chuckles, Poinciana and now Idle Awhile.

An Hanoverian, he now calls Westmoreland home.

Here is his curried gluten. Go ahead and try it, you could be surprised.

… Introducing tofu and gluten

Gluten is a substance found in wheat. It is this substance which gives bread its texture. When bread is baked, the gluten coagulates and becomes firm, giving the distinctive fibrous structure of bread.

There are two proteins in gluten: glutenin and gliadin.

Wheat also contains two other proteins — albumin and globulin –which are soluble in water and dissolve when the flour is wetted.

When cooking with gluten, several minutes’ kneading are required to ‘develop’ or draw out the strands of gluten; but excessive kneading must be avoided because it would overstretch and break the strands, so that the dough would lose its springiness.

Different types of wheat contain differing amounts of gluten.

The largest amounts are found in the durum wheat used to make pasta.

Tofu, that white cheese-looking ‘thing’ in vacuum bags, is in fact a white curd made from soya beans with its origin in China as tou -fu, now doufu.

Tofu, the name commonly employed worldwide, is the Japanese adaptation of this.

The product is also called bean curd. The preparation of tofu, as practised now, begins with soaking the soya beans.

They are then ground with added water, boiled and filtered to produce a warm milk. This is curdled by calcium sulphate, or by a traditional curdling agent called rigari in Japan, this is bitter, the lye left over after the crystallization of salt from sea water.

The curd is then ladled into boxes and pressed to squeeze out the ‘whey’.

Tofu arrived at an early date in Japan and has also been an important food in Korea. The first recorded reference to tofu in Japan is from the 12th century AD, which was also the period when Zen Buddhism, with its vegetarian tenets, became popular there, a development which no doubt favoured the use of tofu ever since.

However, it was only during the early 17th century to late 19th century that tofu became ordinary people’s food in Japan and also became much softer than the original kind.

(Source: Oxford Companion to Food)