Leaning Vegetarian

Posts Tagged ‘seitan’

This batch of Seitan was a plain gluten and water mixture, simmered in chicken-style flavorings of sage and thyme. Unfortunately I found out what happens when you allow seitan to boil – this batch came out much tougher than the earlier batch we’d made.

The sweet chile sauce was an experiment – mix a couple teaspoons of honey or other sweetener with a teaspoon of chile paste (we used the sambal paste here), a teaspoon of oil, and a chopped clove of garlic. That was still a bit too sweet for our taste, so I added some chopped ginger (later in the week we also added some bok choy). Fry these all together until the honey bubbles, and add some sliced seitan. The same sauce works well for chicken too.

I gotta tell you; I was pretty skeptical about the homemade seitan after we’d boiled it and stored the odd-shaped lumps and broth in the fridge. I’d had it before, but boy, this didn’t look quite like an appetizing main dish. At all.

But I figured a stir-fry would mix many tastes together even if it was pretty meh.

Boy, was I wrong. It browns wonderfully in a skillet, and the nice crispy crust and substantial texture worked spectacularly better than I’d hoped.

Start by slicing the seitan into roughly inch square bits, and stir-fry it in a bit of hot oil.

Add a clove of garlic, a dollop of minced ginger, and a green onion to the seitan once both sides are brown. Then add the sliced red peppers and a bit of bok choy, and cook that til the peppers are tender.  Mix a couple tablespoons of hoisin sauce (or to taste) with a bit of water in which you’ve dissolved a sprinkle of cornstarch, and stir that into the pan.  Serve with steamed rice.

Seitan’s definitely a win. Rachelle is considering making a faux chicken salad – I’ll see if I can get her to take pictures and post it.

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.