the.com/tofu

means A soft white food made by curdling soy milk and pressing the curds into blocks, prized for soaking up whatever flavors it's cooked with.

from English borrowed the word directly from Japanese 'tofu,' which in turn came from Chinese 'doufu' — 'dou' meaning bean, 'fu' meaning fermented or curdled. The technique itself traces back over a thousand years in China before spreading through East Asia, with the word riding along into English mainly through Japanese contact in the 18th and 19th centuries.