Champuru

Shima-dofu is the reason champuru works. Okinawan tofu is pressed so firm that it holds together in a hot pan, and cooks tear it by hand and brown it first before the vegetable goes in. Goya is the famous partner. The family also takes in tamana champuru with cabbage, maaminaa with bean sprouts, chirubira with garlic chives, and versions with salted greens or shallots. Fu champuru swaps much of the tofu for wheat gluten soaked in egg. Japanese Wikipedia notes that the tofu-to-vegetable ratio decides whether a cook calls a dish tofu champuru or vegetable champuru.

Okinawan kitchens use a precise vocabulary around it. Irichii means a longer fry-and-simmer, as in kuubu irichii with kelp. A quick oil fry with no tofu is tashiyaa, which is why purists call the somen dish soomin tashiyaa. Vegetables simmered in miso become nbushii, and puttuuru dishes get a starch-thickened dashi at the end. Outside Okinawa the word is widely taken to mean 'mixed up', and the OCVB glosses it as 'to blend'. The Okinawan dictionaries that Japanese Wikipedia cites list it only as the name of the dish, and the 1930 Miyara dictionary defines it as frying in oil.

Nobody has proved where the word comes from. Suggestions include a Chinese tofu stir-fry, an Okinawan word for the sound of frying, Nagasaki chanpon read in Okinawan, and the Malay and Indonesian word campur, which Japanese Wikipedia says spread in the 2000s and gets repeated without a source. The dish's own history has firmer dates. A prefectural governor ate maaminaa champuru at Okinawa Normal School in 1916, and champuru became a daily dish around 1955, when rice replaced sweet potato as the staple.