William Shurtleff

As of 2021, their printed and bound books have sold more than 830,000 copies.

The new availability of soy foods, including tofu, miso, tempeh, and okara, in turn stimulated commercial production of foods based on them. For example, David Mintz invented the non-dairy, kosher pareve ice cream stubstitute Tofutti in 1981: “It was after he opened his Manhattan restaurant, he said in one of many versions of the story, that "a Jewish hippie" tipped him to the potential of tofu. "The Book of Tofu" (1979), by William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi, became his new bible.”

The Book of Tofu sold over 40,000 copies during its first year in print, and almost as many in the second year. By 1980 over 100,000 copies of The Book of Tofu were in print. At that time, their manuals for manufacturers of soy milk and tofu, miso, and tempeh were selling about 125 copies per month.

Shurtleff and Aoyagi went to Indonesia to learn about the manufacture of tempeh, and published The Book of Tempeh in 1979. This book focuses on traditional Indonesian types of tempeh and tempeh recipes, but also contains Western recipes that use tempeh. This book built on a very small but established non-Asian constituency in the United States that was making and using tempeh, including The Farm in Tennessee.

Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi married in 1977. They have one child, Joseph Aoyagi Shurtleff. They divorced in 1995. Aoyagi contributed to their joint publications the many recipes, the covers, and many technical illustrations. She was born in Japan in 1950 and is a 1971 graduate of the Women's College of Art in Tokyo. As of November 2021, she is a freelance illustrator and graphic designer.

Shurtleff and Aoyagi researched and wrote a similar book on miso, The Book of Miso (1976). It focused on Japanese miso, with some attention to similar condiments in other Asian cuisines.

The Book of Tofu (1975) is aimed at the general public in the West. It combines a cookbook with Asian and Western recipes, a history of tofu, and descriptions of small-scale producers of tofu in Japan. The book includes sections on related products such as soy milk, okara, fermented tofu and yuba.

In October 1972 Shurtleff and Aoyagi began full-time research on soy foods in Japan. In 1975 they published their first book, The Book of Tofu. In August 1976 they founded the Soyinfo Center (named Soyfoods Center until 2006) in Lafayette, California.

In turn, the new availability and cultural acceptance of tofu and related foods enabled the creation of new manufactured soy-based foods such as Tofutti and Tofurkey, and arguably gave a push to the vegetarian movement in the West that had begun in the late 1960s.

William Roy Shurtleff (born April 28, 1941) also known as Bill Shurtleff is an American researcher and writer about soy foods. Shurtleff and his former wife Akiko Aoyagi have written and published consumer-oriented cookbooks, handbooks for small- and large-scale commercial production, histories, and bibliographies of various soy foods. These books introduced soy foods such as tofu, tempeh, and miso on a wide scale to non-Asian Westerners, and are largely responsible for the establishment of non-Asian soy food manufacturers in the West beginning in the late 1970s. In 1980, Lorna Sass wrote in The New York Times, "The two people most responsible for catapulting tofu from the wok into the frying pan are William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi.” In 1995, Suzanne Hamlin wrote in The New York Times, “At the turn of the century there were two tofu suppliers in the United States. Today there are more than 200 tofu manufacturers...and tofu can be found in nearly every supermarket."

Shurtleff was born in Oakland, California on April 28, 1941. He attended Stanford University in Palo Alto, where he studied engineering. After work at Stanford, he joined the Peace Corps and taught school in Nigeria. He then joined the Tassajara Zen Center, where he meditated and worked as a cook for .mw-parser-output .frac{white-space:nowrap}.mw-parser-output .frac .num,.mw-parser-output .frac .den{font-size:80%;line-height:0;vertical-align:super}.mw-parser-output .frac .den{vertical-align:sub}.mw-parser-output .sr-only{border:0;clip:rect(0,0,0,0);height:1px;margin:-1px;overflow:hidden;padding:0;position:absolute;width:1px}2+1⁄2 years. Having become interested in soy foods, Shurtleff decided to visit Asia and learn about their manufacture.

Their book History of Soybeans and Soyfoods in Africa (1857-2009): Extensively Annotated Bibliography and Sourcebook received the 2011 STS Oberly Award for Bibliography in the Agricultural or Natural Sciences from the American Library Association.