Leaning Vegetarian

When my co-workers Verna and Marti Lea took me over to the Lotus Pond restaurant for a vegetarian lunch many years ago, I was most puzzled by one of the main ingredients in the buffet there: wheat glutens.

This turned out to be seitan, a cooked and flavored wheat gluten. It had a surprisingly sturdy, chewy texture reminiscent of chicken. Seitan is high in protein and very low in fat; some store varieties have a dab of iron as well.

It can be prepared at home from flour and water, kneaded and run under water to remove the wheat starch, and marinated. There are recipes for simmering it, baking it, and frying it, all of which result in different textures.

What you see here is taken from the Post Punk Kitchen recipe (these amounts are halved – we didn’t have enough vital wheat gluten to make the full recipe).

Vital wheat gluten (the same gluten that bakers add to make bread chewier), nutritional yeast, garlic, soy sauce, and water are mixed to form a stretchy dough, and then boiled.

In this recipe, I’ve rolled it into sausages with the intention of slicing it later to incorporate into a stir fry or to pan fry the slices. I’ve also read preparations that form it into a cutlet shape for frying.

After the broth with the seitan is brought up to a boil, it’s simmered for an hour. The small sliceable shapes are, well,  a lot larger by this point:

I’ll store these in the fridge with some of the broth for use later in the week.

When we decide on a dish, I’ll post the recipe and our taste test in a few days.

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