- Elimination
- Reintroduction
- Maintenance
- Lunch
- Dinner
Crispy Tofu and Green Bean Stir-Fry
A proper vegetarian main that is not just a side dish with more of it. The trick is drying the tofu properly before it ever meets the pan.
- Prep
- 15 min
- Cook
- 15 min
- Total
- 30 min
- Serves
- 4
Published
Ingredients
Makes 4 servings. Each ingredient is labelled with its FODMAP status at this quantity.
- Low FODMAP
500 g firm tofu, drained and pressed
Low FODMAP at 170 g. Firm or extra-firm only — silken tofu is high FODMAP and cannot be swapped in.
- Portion-dependent
300 g green beans, trimmed and halved
Low FODMAP at 75 g — about 15 beans — per serve.
- Portion-dependent
300 g red bell pepper, sliced
Low FODMAP at 75 g per serve.
- Low FODMAP
3 tbsp cornflour
This is what makes the tofu crisp rather than merely browned.
- Low FODMAP
3 tbsp neutral oil, such as rice bran or sunflower
- Low FODMAP
2 tbsp garlic-infused olive oil
- Low FODMAP
25 g fresh ginger, finely grated
- Low FODMAP
3 tbsp soy sauce or tamari
Low FODMAP at 2 tbsp per serve; this is well under once split four ways.
- Low FODMAP
1 tbsp maple syrup
- Low FODMAP
1 tbsp rice vinegar
- Low FODMAP
1 tbsp toasted sesame oil
- Low FODMAP
4 spring onions, green tops only, sliced
Green tops only. The white bulb is high in fructans and must be discarded.
- Low FODMAP
2 tsp sesame seeds
- Low FODMAP
1 1/2 cups jasmine rice, uncooked, to serve
What the labels mean
- Low FODMAPSafe at the serving size listed.
- Portion-dependentLow FODMAP only up to the serving size listed — larger servings stack.
Method
Step 1: Press the tofu properly: wrap the block in a clean tea towel, sit a heavy pan on top, and leave it for at least 15 minutes while you prepare everything else. Water on the surface is the single reason tofu steams instead of crisping.
Step 2: Start the rice so it is ready at the same time as the pan. Cut the pressed tofu into 2 cm cubes and toss them with the cornflour until every face is dusted.
Step 3: Whisk the soy sauce, maple syrup, rice vinegar, sesame oil and grated ginger together in a small bowl and set it beside the hob. Once the stir-fry starts there is no time to measure.
Step 4: Heat the neutral oil in a large wok or frying pan over medium-high. Add the tofu in a single layer and leave it alone for 3 minutes before turning — moving it early tears the crust off. Fry until golden on most sides, about 8 minutes, then lift out onto a plate.
Step 5: Add the garlic-infused oil to the same pan, then the green beans and red pepper. Stir-fry hard for 4 to 5 minutes, until the beans blister and darken in patches but still snap.
Step 6: Return the tofu, pour in the sauce and toss for 1 minute until everything is glossy and the sauce clings. Scatter with spring onion greens and sesame seeds and serve over the rice.
Notes and swaps
- Buy tofu sold in water in a block, not the vacuum-packed shelf-stable kind, and never the silken. The FODMAP difference between firm and silken is not a matter of degree — it is the difference between safe and not.
- If the beans are going soft before they blister, the pan is not hot enough or it is too crowded. Cook them in two batches rather than dropping the heat.
- Bottled stir-fry sauces are the most common way people get caught out here. Hoisin, oyster sauce, black bean and virtually every supermarket teriyaki list onion or garlic in the first few ingredients.
Vegetarian cooking and the low-FODMAP diet collide badly. The vegetarian protein staples are beans, lentils and chickpeas, which are the highest-GOS foods on the list, and the flavour base for most vegetarian cooking is onion and garlic, which are the highest-fructan.
Tofu is the way through, and it is worth understanding why — because the wrong tofu is genuinely high FODMAP and sits on the same shelf as the right one.
Firm yes, silken no
Soybeans are high in galacto-oligosaccharides. Tofu made from them should be a problem, and silken tofu is.
The difference is the process. Firm tofu is made by curdling soy milk and then pressing the curds to squeeze out the whey. GOS are water-soluble, so they leave with the water. What stays behind is protein and fat. Monash puts firm tofu at 170 g in the low-FODMAP range.
Silken tofu is set in its container and never pressed. Nothing drains, so the GOS stay where they are. It is high FODMAP at any portion worth eating.
This is one of the few places in the protocol where two products with the same name on adjacent shelves fall on opposite sides of the line. Read the block, not the word “tofu”.
Fifteen beans
Green beans are low FODMAP at 75 g per serve — around fifteen beans — and moderate above that, where the sorbitol starts to accumulate.
That is a real portion, and it is also easy to overshoot when you are cooking a shared pan and helping yourself twice. The recipe is built to four servings from 300 g deliberately: the arithmetic works as long as the pan gets divided four ways rather than eaten from.
The sauce is where people get caught
Almost nothing about a stir-fry is risky. Tofu, rice, beans, peppers, ginger, sesame — all clear.
The bottle is the problem. Hoisin, oyster sauce, black bean, char siu and essentially every supermarket stir-fry and teriyaki sauce lead with garlic, onion or both, usually in the first four ingredients. A tablespoon of any of them will undo an otherwise careful meal.
Whisking soy, maple, vinegar, sesame and ginger together takes forty seconds and gives you something better anyway. Ginger in particular does a lot of the aromatic work that garlic normally would, which is why there is 25 g of it here rather than a token teaspoon.
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