Tofu has little flavour or smell of its own. In the cuisines it comes from that is the specification, not a defect: it works as a bland background for presenting the flavours of everything else in the dish, and it is sold in graded textures from silken through soft and firm to extra firm, each suited to different cooking. Which coagulant is used changes the result again: calcium sulfate gives a tender but slightly brittle block, magnesium salts a smoother one. Western kitchens largely imported it under a different brief. It arrived commonly as a meat substitute, which sets up an expectation tofu was never designed to meet, and invites a comparison it will always lose. A food asked to taste like nothing is being judged against a food asked to taste like beef. That framing, plus the fact that a firm block and a silken one behave nothing alike, probably explains why tofu draws one of the highest hate shares of any food YouGov tested (29%), while a fifth of Americans still love or like it and 12% cannot say either way.