Last week's cover story about cooking with yuba—bean curd skin—stated that although dried bean curd is widely available here, none of the tofu shops in Honolulu still make the product fresh.

Longtime fans of this product will be thrilled to learn that we were wrong. There is a place in Honolulu where you can buy this Asian delicacy fresh off the vat.

Mune Yamada, president of tofu shop Soy to the World, recently moved his operations from Manoa Marketplace to an industrial facility in Waiakamilo.

Yamada wants to focus on producing the kind of handmade soy products sold by specialty tofu makers in Japan—and hallelujah, he is skimming yuba off the vats three days a week.

Show up at the factory doors on Monday, Wednesday or Friday morning, and you can buy fresh 100-gram packages of bean curd skin—but come early, because it tends to sell out before noon. (One fan reports that they will hold some for you if you call ahead.) The shop makes only a kilogram of yuba each day, and some of it goes to Japanese restaurants such as Kaiwa and Rokkaku, where you can taste it already prepared.

Soy to the World, housed in the Fujiya factory (the mochi maker, and Yamada's employer) at 454 Waiakamilo Road, also makes various types of soy milk and tofu that are nothing like the watery, heavily processed products found at the supermarket.

They're thick, creamy, certainly not to everyone's taste—but tofu connoisseurs line up for them.

Yamada got his start producing organic soybeans in Japan. He doesn't see himself as a competitor to local tofu makers such as Kanai and Aloha, which are factories.

And does that make for a creamier, tastier yuba skimmed off the top?

“;You should try it,”; Yamada concludes.