Opened tofu has days, not weeks. The five nights are ordered by how it falls apart.
Korean groceries sell tofu in multi-block packs, or in blocks bigger than the ones you knew back home. It's cheap, and that's where the trouble starts. You make one pot of jjigae, put the rest in the fridge, and pull it out four days later to find a slippery surface and a sour smell. Then it goes in the bin.
Tofu has no parts to divide up the way cabbage does, and freezing it isn't really an option. What it does have is a different property: it crumbles more the longer it sits. So this plan is ordered not by part but by **structure** — the dishes that need a slice to stay whole come first, and the ones that don't care come last.
American stores sort tofu into firm, extra-firm, soft, and silken. Korean recipes say 부침용 (for pan-frying), 찌개용 (for stews), and 순두부 (silken). Nobody hands you the table that connects the two, so the first attempt is usually a random block and a 부침 that disintegrates in the pan.
Roughly, it maps like this. Extra-firm and firm are your 부침용 and 구이용 — low enough in water to hold their shape. Soft is closest to 찌개용, and silken is 순두부. Silken collapses if you lift it with your hands, so never try to pan-fry it. If a package is labelled 부침용 in Korean, that's the surest thing on the shelf.
An unopened block keeps until the date on the package. Everything changes once it's open. Put whatever is left in a container and add enough water to cover it completely — any surface sitting above the water dries out and spoils first.
Change that water every day. It clouds within a day, and cloudy water is what turns the tofu. Changed daily, you get three to four days comfortably, five if the block was fresh. That is why this plan is five days and not seven.
The shape of the tofu matters less as the week goes on. Move the days around if you need to, but keep the order — the later dishes are the ones that forgive a crumbling block.
The night you open it. Pan-frying needs a thick slice to hold together on its own, so it has to happen while the block is at its firmest.
See recipe→Grilling still needs the shape to hold. Press the water out with paper towels first and it goes far better.
See recipe→Frying sets the outside, so a slightly soft block is fine here. A tender interior is arguably the point.
See recipe→Diced into soup. From here on, a few broken edges disappear into the pot.
See recipe→Everything left goes in. In a jjigae, tofu breaking up isn't a flaw — it thickens the broth.
See recipe→Water is the usual reason tofu dishes fail. Take a block straight from its soaking container to a hot pan and the oil spits and the surface breaks before it can brown. Set the tofu between two paper towels, weigh it down with a plate for ten minutes, and most of that problem goes away.
In a hurry, slice it and salt it lightly — the water comes out faster. For the pan-fry and the grill, meaning the first two nights, don't skip this. For the soup and stew in the back half, it doesn't matter.
This is what the five dishes need. Apart from the tofu, most of it keeps.
Dried pollock and Korean radish make day four's soup what it should be, but any vegetables you have will do. The list is built so nothing missing sends you back out mid-week.
The gram amounts in the linked recipes come straight from the public dataset, where they serve as reference values for measuring nutrition. Sixty grams of tofu is a slice or two in practice, which won't make a meal on its own.
What this plan fixes is the order, not the weights. Keep to which cooking method belongs to which day and scale the amounts to however many people are eating. The last night's stew assumes a whole block goes in.
Three things to check: whether the surface feels slippery, whether it smells sour, and whether the soaking water has gone slimy. Any one of them and cooking won't bring it back. However annoying, throw it out.
If some survives all five days, it freezes. But frozen and thawed tofu is a different ingredient — the water leaves holes behind and it turns spongy and chewy, so it can't go back into a pan-fry or a stew. It does soak up sauce beautifully, which makes it good in braises and stir-fries. Treat it as its own thing.