Producción De Tempeh

32

Tempeh: The ‘‘ Other’’ White Beancake
Seth Tibbott
Turtle Island Foods, Inc., Hood River, Oregon, U.S.A.

I.

INTRODUCTION

Most Americans in the year 2000 could identify tofu as soybean cake originating in China
and Japan, a very small percentage had some knowledge of tempeh, the fermented soybean
or grain cake from Indonesia (Fig. 1). For the purpose of this chapter, tempeh (ortempe,
pronounced ‘‘tem-pay’’) is defined as a fermented cake of soybeans or grains that has been
a traditional staple of the Indonesian people for centuries.
In the year 2002 in North America, tempeh production was about 14,000 lb (ca. 6364
kg) per day, with three major manufacturers producing about 90% of the volume. The
market value of this volume is about $10 million per year. The averageweekly consumption
per person in Denpasar (Bali, Indonesia) and Yogyakarta (Java, Indonesia) is 75 g and 200 g,
respectively. A large manufacturer produces about 5000 pounds of tempeh a day in
Yogyakarta, Indonesia, but with a market value of less than $1000. However, when adjusted
to the per capita income in these two countries, a cake of tempeh is about 4 times ‘‘cheaper’’
in the UnitedStates. In Indonesia, tempeh was considered the poor person’s food in the past,
but now it is proudly viewed more as a precious part of the unique cultural heritage of
Indonesian cuisine (1).

II.

THE HISTORY OF TEMPEH IN INDONESIA AND THE UNITED STATES

Tempeh is unique among soyfoods in that it did not originate in China or Japan. It
originated on the Island of Java in Indonesia prior to1800, and maybe as long ago as a
thousand years. Not much is known about the origins of this food except that it was part of
a group of fermented foods that were developed by people with no scientific background in
food sciences or fermentation. Tempeh was made not only on soybean substrates but on a
variety of agricultural by-products such as peanut and coconut presscake and okara, or soypulp, which is left over after the production of tofu.
Although, the earliest references in Indonesian literature were only in the early 1800s,
tempeh is believed to have been developed long before that time due to the widespread
geographical distribution of the product throughout Java and all of Indonesia. Tempeh is a
major part of the cuisine of Indonesia where it is made by more than 40,000cottage
industry sized shops using very basic tools and open-air fermentation (2).

Copyright 2004 by Marcel Dekker, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Figure 1

Tibbott

Example of tempeh sold at an Indonesian market.

One argument has been advanced that tempeh originated some 2000 years ago,
brought to Indonesia by Chinese traders who were at that time already fermenting soybean
kojifor their soy sauce. This technique could have been modified by local Indonesians to
suit Javanese tastes and climate—Rhizopus is better adapted to the heat and humidity of the
tropics than the Aspergillus oryzae used by the Chinese in their koji (2).
The first Westerners to study tempeh were two Dutch scientists, H.C. Prinsen Geerligs
and F. A. Went, who were studying the utilization of sugarby-products from the Dutch
sugar plantations in the late 1800s. Indonesia was a Dutch colony from the late 1600s
through the 1960s, hence much of the early scientific work was done by the Dutch (2).
During World War II, a Dutch microbiologist, Van Veen, was held as a POW (prisoner of war) along with many American soldiers by the Japanese. Van Veen noted during
postwar studies that tempeh wasmuch easier to digest than plain cooked soybeans. He
concluded that many POWs, especially those with dysentery and edema, owed their lives to
tempeh, which gave them badly needed protein that they could easily assimilate (2).
The first American researcher to study tempeh was Dr. Clifford Hesseltine of the
Northern Regional Research Center in Peoria, Illinois. There, Dr. Hesseltine concluded
that...