It's easy to miss the faded wooden sign,
the nondescript entrance on southeast
Stark and Sandy, but regulars.
No, this place well on a
red tray atop a bucket.
Co-owner Sharon Ogada sets fresh tofu
for a stream of walking customers.
Other requests for area temples
are large enough for full bags to
be carried out to waiting cars.
OTA tofu has a following for a reason.
It's the oldest tofu producer
in America still in operation.
Since 1911, size Oota started it
to serve the many Japanese living.
And working in Portland,
he made it the traditional way,
stirring and pressing the beans by
hand with only three ingredients,
soy, beans, water and the Japanese
coagulant nigiri or magnesium
chloride that turned soy milk from
the beans into curds when saizou his
family and 120,000 other Japanese Americans
were ordered to an Idaho internment
camp during World War Two in the 40s.
He locked the door of OTA tofu.
Not knowing what would happen,
he died there.
Never seen the shop again after the war.
His wife returned to Portland
and relaunched the business.
It was that culinary connection
of something tasting just
like home for a Japanese
community scarred by racism and
cultural fear. I do feel the
pressure of keeping this legacy
going right, producing a product
that is up to their standards.
Jason Ogada throws on his apron and
rubber boots at 2:30 in the morning,
six days a week.
As the new owner since 2019,
he grew up in Portland,
playing baseball for Oregon State,
drafted to the Texas Rangers before
getting his MBA and working a
corporate job on the East Coast.
His mother, Sharon and optometrist,
bought this tofu for years before
the matriarch of the family confided.
She was ready to retire.
But didn't want the business to
end with her Sharon convinced son
Jason to move his family back home
to Portland and run OTA together.
I'm
kind of new. That being a
business owner is a lot of work.
I did not know it was this much work.
Ogata is in the facility cooking
and straining the ground soybeans
right along with his staff.
A lot of the tofu manufacturers,
now they just use the machine
and in mass produced tofu and
we can't keep up with that.
How we do it and why we do it is because
we think it makes better tofu. Oh
Goddess says never.
In a million years would
he ever change the name.
To match his own, there's too
much history and homage to pay
to that generation 110 years ago,
but so much has changed.
Portland is a food Mecca,
healthy eating veganism and
melding food cultures has inspired
chefs to use oh tofu on pizza
in Mexican or Italian cuisine,
not to mention
Top Chef is back 15 of the country's
best chefs. Have traveled to
Portland OR being featured for
an entire episode of the biggest
chef competition show around.
We want you to show off the
versatility of tofu ornament style. To
be on a national stage like that you
know it's a dream come
true for a small business
owner. Website clicks and emails
from all over the country have
flooded in restaurants and home
cooks wanting to use his tofu,
but the authentic handmade process
Ogata vows never to stray from means
they can't go faster than the 500
blocks they make per hour.
Somehow he must scale bigger.
It is always something that I
have dreamed of ever since.
Taking over this.
I see it in our future.