More than two hundred and fifty years ago, the head priest of Joanji, the temple administering the Akiba Sanjakubo shrine, asked a local tofu maker named Rinzo to come up with something pilgrims could take home. This oversized fried tofu is what he came back with.

It is oversized from the start. Even before frying, the block is thicker and broader than an ordinary abura-age, and the frying is done twice, in two pans at different temperatures. The dough goes first into low-heat oil to warm through, then into hot oil, where it is turned continuously and swells.

There are fifteen shops making them in Tochio today, in a district of Nagaoka that most people outside Niigata would struggle to place on a map at all.

To eat one you warm it briefly over a flame, cut a slit in the side, and push scallion and bonito flakes into the opening with a little soy sauce. The outside is crisp and the inside is soft and dense with soybean flavor, and the whole thing eats far more like a small meal than like a piece of tofu. A priest asked a man to think up a souvenir for pilgrims, and the man left behind a specialty that has now lasted two and a half centuries.