Aburage (properly called abura-age = 油揚げ) is a Japanese food product made from soybeans. It is produced by cutting tofu into thin slices and deep frying it. Aburage is often used to wrap inarizushi (稲荷寿司), and is added to miso soup. It is also added to udon noodle dishes which are called kitsune-udon because of legends that foxes (kitsune) like deep-fried tofu. Aburage can also be stuffed e.g. with natto before frying again. There is a thicker variety known as atsuage (厚揚げ). Binomial name Glycine max Merr. ... Tofu, sometimes also called bean curd, is a food made by coagulating soy milk, and then pressing the resulting curds into blocks. ... Sushi variations with Kanji names behind. ... Miso soup (味噌汁, misoshiru in Japanese) is a traditional Japanese soup consisting of a stock called dashi into which is dissolved softened miso. ... Kake Udon Udon (Japanese: うどん, rarely 饂飩 or 餛飩; Chinese: 烏冬, or often 烏冬麵) is a type of thick wheat-based noodle popular in Korean and Japanese cuisine. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Natto eaten on top of rice is always stirred before consumption Nattō (納豆) is a traditional Japanese food product made from fermented soybeans, popular especially at breakfast. ...

The Japanese were the first to develope tofu pouches, which are the most sophisticated of all tofu products in terms of complexity of the production. However little is known of their early history. The Tofu Hyakuchin of 1782 (Abe 1972) gave a recipe for deep-fried tofu, but it is not clear if it puffed up like a tofu pouch. It is known that tofu pouches existed by 1853, when Inari-zushi (tofu pouch filled with vinegared rice) originated (Ichiyama 1968). Because of their long storage life, light weight, and complexity of production, tofu pouches lend themselves to large-scale factory production and widespread distribution. By 1974 large factories were using 2 metric tons of soybeans a day to make 116,600 tofu pouches. By 1980 huge modern factories produced 300,000 to 450,000 pouches a day using conveyorized deep-fryers. At this time roughly one third of the soybeans consumed for tofu in Japan were for deep-fried tofu and an estimated 85% of this was for tofu pouches. [[[1]]]

http://www.thesoydailyclub.com/SFC/NFsoyfoods367.asp