For many Filipinos, taho is a sound as much as a food: a vendor working their way down the street with two aluminium buckets swinging off a pole, calling out “Taho!” in the early hours.
Taho is breakfast in a cup. Silken tofu, still warm, is scooped out in soft sheets rather than cubes. Over that goes arnibal (caramelised palm sugar syrup) and sago pearls (the smaller and translucent version of tapioca pearls). It’s usually eaten standing on the footpath, in about a minute. The tofu has to be warm and fresh, which is why it comes to you, and why nobody in the Philippines thinks of it as a dessert to queue for. It’s just there, most mornings, for anyone who wants it.
You can find taho in Melbourne, if you look. What’s almost impossible to get is fresh taho, made to order, the way Taho Tayo does it.
Chef Matthew Paredes started the brand after 10 years in top Melbourne kitchens, including Askal, Etta and Ides. What was a monthly pop-up became a successful one-month residency at Dandenong Market, then a permanent shop that opened earlier this year.
There are seven flavours on the current menu: brown sugar, ube, buko (coconut) pandan, peach mango, coffee, ginger, and strawberry. Paredes preps and serves everything himself. On a big market day that’s 200-plus cups. At a recent Queen Victoria Market pop-up, it climbed over 600. Those are big numbers given his exacting approach.
“We’re never just pre-making the tofu and taking it to an event or to a shop,” Paredes says. “It’s at its best quality when you make it that fresh.”
That means more than 100 litres of soy milk a week, set in four-litre batches across the day, about an hour from milk to ready, roughly 20 portions at a time. He reads the room and adjusts: “If it’s busy, okay, let’s make more tofu. If it’s quiet, stop.”
The tapioca pearls are made outside service, when the roller shutter is down. Almost nobody rolls pearls by hand anymore. The ones in your boba are extruded and cut by a machine, thousands an hour, then frozen and shipped. Traditionally, taho uses sago, which you can also get from your local Asian store. Paredes rolls every pearl himself, one at a time. Even rolled ahead, they go into the pot in small lots throughout the day, so they never sit long enough to stiffen.
What makes them worth the hours is that he flavours them to match every cup, which isn’t common even in the Phillipines: an ube pearl for the ube, pandan for the buko pandan, strawberry for the strawberry.
“I’ll make strawberry syrup with fresh fruit, and the by-product is the strawberries. I use that in the dough, and that becomes the strawberry pearls.”
Taho Tayo
Dandenong Market, Cleeland Street and Clow Street
No phone
Hours
Tue and Fri 9am–3pm
Sat and Sun 9am–3.30pm