Random photo from 2024, so pardon the mess on the table.
For seven years, my wife and I have eaten scrambled tofu for breakfast, Monday through Thursday. That's somewhere around 1,300 bowls.
If you haven't had it: scrambled tofu is the vegan answer to scrambled eggs, crumbled and sautéed with spices to land somewhere close to the real thing. My wife's vegan, and we like sharing breakfast and coffee before the day splits us up: work for me, school drop-off for the kids now. Tofu turned out to be the breakfast that actually stuck. Everything we tried before it was either not filling enough or not good enough to eat five days a week for years running.
What's kept it interesting is that there's no single way to make it. Over those seven years we've changed jobs, had two kids, bought a house, renovated it, lived in a tiny apartment for a stretch, and moved into a new place. The tofu changed right along with all of it.
We started simple: nutritional yeast, salt, sautéed on the stove. That worked for a while. Then we'd see a recipe online and bolt something on, paprika one week, garlic the next, and run with it for a few days to see if it stuck.
After watching Salt Fat Acid Heat, we decided the tofu needed more acid, so we tried za'atar. That one stayed. Then we wanted more of an eggy flavor, so we added black salt, the sulfurous stuff that actually smells like eggs. That worked too, until keeping a jar of it stocked every week turned out to be more effort than it was worth, and we dropped it.
Then our second kid showed up, and we needed the whole morning to run hands-off. So we started cooking the tofu the night before and reheating it in the toaster oven. That held for a while, but we didn't want a second pan dirty every night, so we switched to baking it from raw in the toaster oven instead of sautéing it at all. That's roughly where we've landed for now.
Every one of those changes got a real trial. And every one eventually got knocked loose by something outside the recipe: a new kid, a new kitchen, a new schedule. We were chasing the best tofu for right now. Right now kept moving.
The same rules apply to revenue
The basis is the same whether you're making breakfast or moving revenue for a business: stay open to trying something new, and keep looking for where you can improve. Experiments come in a lot of shapes. Sometimes it's an A/B test, sometimes it's just making a change and reading the tea leaves, but the work behind it is the same either way: talk to customers, look at the business intelligence you've got, form a hypothesis, and make a change big enough that people actually notice it.
A few things held up on both the stove and the website:
- You need more than one try to know if you love or hate something. A single morning tells you almost nothing. Run it for a week or two before you trust your own reaction.
- Make the change big enough to notice. A pinch more paprika won't tell you anything. Add enough that you can taste the difference, then dial it back if it's too much.
- Don't be afraid to change more than one thing at once. The goal isn't to isolate which variable moved the needle, it's to make the best tofu, or the best site. Change things together, read what happened, and decide what to touch next. You can always pare back the changes later if you need to know which one mattered.
- Use inspiration, don't copy it outright. Their za'atar ratio, their homepage, their onboarding flow: none of it was built for your kitchen or your customers. It's a fine starting point. It's never the finish line.
Seven years in, we're still not done, and we don't expect to be. The tofu we make tonight is built for the four of us, in this kitchen, this month. In another year, something will change, and we'll change the tofu with it.
The (current) Aronstein tofu recipe
For speed and convenience on a weekday morning.
Ingredients:
- 1 block of tofu, lightly pressed and hand-torn
- Oil (don't be shy)
- Nutritional yeast, eyeballed until every piece is coated
- A large splash of paprika
- A half splash of za'atar
- A half splash of turmeric
- Optional: sugar
Steps:
- Tear the tofu onto a baking sheet lined with parchment (we reuse the same sheet of parchment the next morning)
- Pour the oil over the tofu and mix
- In a separate bowl, mix the dry ingredients
- Pour the dry mix over the tofu and mix again
- Bake at 400°F for 29 minutes
- The next morning, reheat at 300°F for 10 minutes while you make coffee