His neighbors said he was crazy. The food experts he consulted told him he was wasting his time. His wife thought he had become obsessed. But David Mintz persisted, filling the night with the sound of clattering pots and high-pitched mixers, as he looked for a way to make a nondairy frozen dessert from the soybean curd, tofu.

      David Mintz was always seeking a nondairy substitute to use at his delicatessen. But everything he ever tried tasted just awful. Then one day Mintz read an article in a health magazine about tofu. A soybean curd, tofu had long been used in Asian cuisine, but was just beginning to gain acceptance among health-conscious Americans.

      "I said, 'Hey, this is what I've been looking for all my life.' So I went to Chinatown, picked up a pail of tofu and started experimenting."

       Mintz's early experiments yielded impressive results. "The first thing I made was tofu 'sour cream'. I put the tofu in a blender, threw in some lemon juice, added a little seasoning, a touch of mustard, and boom - I had sour cream. Then I started to make tofu pancakes, tofu cheese dips, tofu quiche .... It was fantastic. Discovering tofu was like discovering America; it opened a whole new world."

      But Mintz had a difficult time trying to develop a tofu dessert. Tofu's soybean flavor, never noticeable in a heavily spiced and cooked dish, dominated the more subtle-tasting ingredients in frozen desserts.

      Mintz recalled, "I tried doing everything, but nothing worked. Ideas would come to me in the middle of the night, and I'd jump out of bed and hurry to the kitchen to try them. My wife was convinced that I had flipped out, and really, she might have been right; tofu had become a thing with me."

      He visited a university to discuss his problem with food technologists. "They told me to forget it, that the idea of a soy-based dessert had been tried before and it just couldn't be done. This only made me want to do it more. The biggest obstacle to anyone's success are the people who will tell him it can't work."

      Mintz finally succeeded in creating a frozen tofu dessert that had an agreeable soy-free taste. Without divulging any trade secrets, the Tofutti inventor did offer some insights into the tofu dessert-making process.

      "Every Tofutti flavor represented a different challenge. The toughest flavor was probably strawberry, which has a very delicate taste. No matter how many strawberries I put in, it would still come out tasting like soy. Then I finally discovered that I could bring out the taste of strawberries, and kill the taste of soy, by adding apple juice."

      Having perfected his frozen dessert formula, Mintz test-marketed it by giving free samples to the people at his delicatessen on Third Avenue in Manhattan. When people began asking where they could buy the product, the restaurateur set up a freezer display of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry packages.

      Once he started to package his product, Mintz had to give it a name: "Tofutti just came to me late one night, and I knew it was right."

      Soon the demand for Tofutti spread beyond Manhattan.

      Then, Mintz faced a major decision: he could remain at his restaurant and sell Tofutti as a sideline, or he could risk everything in an attempt to turn his invention into a national food product.

      "I was 50 years old, and I had a successful delicatessen, but I sold everything and started over again. A lot of people said I must have gone crazy to do this at 50. But I told them, 'Look, for my first 50 years I owned a deli, for my next 50 I'm going to make Tofutti.'"

      Mintz purchased an abandoned frozen food warehouse in Brooklyn. He spent the next year working alone to repair the run-down building.

      Mintz sold his first order of Tofutti to a shop called The Health Nut in Manhattan. "I delivered it myself in my car, and I wound up getting a $45 ticket for double parking when I dropped the order off, but I didn't care - my business was on its way."

      His first big break occurred when Bloomingdale's placed an order, giving Tofutti exposure to a large number of shoppers. "Then we started getting orders from all over the place," said Mintz. "To give you an idea of how fast we grew, I started out alone with one phone and an answering machine; within a year or two, my office had thirty-eight phones that were ringing like crazy."

      Among the plans that Mintz has on the drawing board are tofu cookies and pastries and soy meatballs. "Once again, I have people telling me that my ideas for new soy products won't work," said the Tofutti inventor. But David Mintz just smiles and shrugs off the skeptics, and the little voice inside his head still whispers, "Keep going, keep going."

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