Seitan - General Guidance
Well friends, I girded my loins and tried making my own seitan yesterday. I had trawled the Net for info and some of it was contradictory, others were confusing, but I did find out how to make it with gluten powder and when to freeze it--after the initial cooking.
I always follow the easiest recipe thru the way it says the first time and go from there. NOW I understand why they recommend you add seasonings, herbs, mushroom powder etc. to the gluten mix...it tastes of absolutely nothing, as is. I mean, imagine eating an eraser. OK as a chewing exercise...flavour, not so much! LOL I also understand why they suggest you work it very little (mine was almost as dense as me!) and if it weren't 100º out I might have tried baking instead of boiling it.
BUT...and it's a big but...after I had laughed at the way it swells up when you boil it and looks like something out of a biology lab, and tasted it and found it...well, completely tasteless...I sliced it up and marinaded it in an African barbecue sauce. And DH the carnivore tasted it and did NOT go "Gross!" or laugh at me about it. We agreed the recipe and method need "tweaking" and that I need to print out the instructions and follow them closely, but that we are definitely onto something, at less than a dollar a pound for pure food, no waste. No bones, no fat, no cholesterol...and cheap! He ate some and said maybe we should put it in a curry etc.
10 years ago or even 5 he would have laughed at me and made "cute" remarks all the time I was trying to eat it. Now he agrees we need to eat less meat and things like this will help that. From his point of view it is purely economic (he is facing disability retirement) but hey, any start is a good one. Now if I could just get him to eat things with leaves and roots... ::)
Thank you for the replies & help... :)
I have looked at Henry's Market (Wild Oats) and at Trader Joe's but they don't carry it. Haven't tried Whole Foods or an Asian market but they are not very convenient for me.
The method I tried before was from the "Simply Heavenly! : The Monastery Vegetarian Cookbook", from scratch using White & Wheat flour. Felt like I kneaded & washed for an eternity, then cooked it in a "meat" flavored broth (also from the cookbook) in my pressure cooker, according to the recipe. The flavor from the broth was delicious but the texture made it inedible, nothing like the seitan I'd had before.
Maybe I'll try making it with the Vital Wheat Gluten Flour, and see if I do any better...
Oh, you'll be amazed... from flour, it's a huge pain, but from wheat gluten it's easy and relatively mess-free (only relatively), and the results are superior. ;)
The tinned seitan I find in the Asian grocery here is singularly lacking in flavour but has a good texture, good for spicy or strongly-flavoured sauces. I prefer baking seitan to boiling it, it's a little less work. Here's a recipe I made up:
http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=12040.0
As Dave says, if I can make it, so can you. I have very few special gadgets in my kitchen and I managed this fine.
Bob's Red Mill also sells vital wheat gluten. I'm sure I have seen it in that package. And I think you can order their products directly online.
I see a recipe on here to make your own seitan: http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=7592.0
My question is, what do you do with it? Anyone have a good recipe? Can you bake it, fry it, grill it? What does it taste like? I'd like to try it as not to overdo it on soy.
Thanks for the help, this is a totally foreign food avenue to me!
I too am still learning about seitan. If you're making the boiled kind, I suggest you put all the flavourings (spices, herbs, granules or whatever) in the gluten and mix it in that way. Mine never seems to absorb much in the water. I've only made boiled seitan once, and the air in front of my face had more flavour.
I like baked seitan best, here's a recipe I made up: http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=12040.0 As you see, the "dough" has all the flavours mixed in first. Like tofu, you need to give it a chance to take on the tastes before you use it.
I find seitan hard to cut finely; maybe I make mine too gummy, but I tend to end up using it as you might "stewing beef." Maybe I need a sharper knife...
BAYPUPPY: I don't have access to any vegan cookbooks here, nor can I order them on line. (DH is the only one with plastic, and I'm unemployed). I wonder if you could post the basic VwV recipe without infringing all kinds of laws? You can reach me at lachimpa40ATyahooDOTcoDOTuk with the necessary substitutions.
Gee, Baypuppy, I like the idea of using the crock pot. How long do you cook it and on low or high?
Yabbitgirl: Go to postpunkkitchen.com's forum. In the kitchen are, Isa Chandra (the author of vwav) will probably post it for you herself! It's a great forum for herbivores.
The seitan recipe is posted on the ppk.com site under Isa's recipes. I've made it and it's a very decent recipe. There are also a whole bunch of seitan-making recipes on this site. I made the one recently for "seitan cooking school" You can also just use the recipe on the back of the box of Arrowhead Mills Vital Wheat Gluten. The tricky part about seitan is getting the texture right so you don't end up with a matzoh ball or a piece of rubber.
Thanks for the link to ppk. I have bookmarked it. My problem is (and I hate to go on about it) that here in Spain it's so different--we don't have the same brands or products you all do. For example "Bragg's Aminos." Whatever it may be we don't have it here. Gluten? You can only get it at one particular healthfood chain, it comes with no instructions, it's a one-pound transparent plastic bag of "wheat gluten." That's all it says. And you can't get it anywhere else.
Fortunately the Asian market is giving the hfs a run for their money; they DO stock yakisoba, GRITS (angelic chorus here please! :D) real brown rice, gram flour, and their rice milk is less than $3 a pint.
SOOOO....I will copy Isa's seitan recipe and do some more experimenting. DH says that for now he prefers tofu, esp. the smoked and pressed kind that here is known as tofu gan. From what I see here on vegweb it is not known under that name over there where y'all are...I know the feeling. :P
yabbitgirl--you can make seitan the old fashioned way with a combination of whole wheat and white flour. It is more labor intensive but it really isn't that incredibly hard, especially if you have a food processor or good quality stand mixer to do the kneading for you. The pain is in rinsing it. I took a seitan making class at a natural foods cooking school and we made it one night. (As all of us were halfway into the kneading process the instructor remembered to ask us if we had washed our hands! Good thing we cooked the tar out of it.)
If you cannot find a recipe for old fashioned seitan I have several ones I can post for you--there is one in the Candle Cafe Cookbook I know of and I'm sure I can find others. I can also post the instructions that were handed out at the class.
Also, someone the other night--Tkitty I think--recommended the Byranna Clark Grogan blog. That is quite an amazing blog and she very well might have a recipe there.
Yabbitgirl:
Here is a recipe I found on vegcooking:
http://www.vegcooking.com/recipeshow.asp?RequestID=783&Search=seitan
(I searched for "seitan "and found a recipe called "seitan" halfway down the list)
It very much sounds like the recipe we used in my class. This recipe doesn't say so, but you can also knead quite well for ten minutes with a dough hook in a stand mixer. As an experiment one group of students also used a food processor and it worked quite well.
Also, when you are finished rinsing, the ball of gluten will definitely resemble a brain. Yuk!
Yup, that was my experience. I guess my seitan made with Spanish gluten by hand (I don't even have a mixer, no one does things like that here and a decent one would be major money...and where would I keep it in my tiny kitchen?) was "made right"...but needs the flavouring first as I said in my first post on this topic. We joked about it being something made by Igor in the science lab!!
I have since surfed several recipes...maybe I boiled mine too long because it was definitely very dry. And the baked was too gummy but it did have some WW flour in it. Need to experiment some more.
Never worry, it took me years to master the "arriero" sauce my aged MIL could make every time. But I finally did.
Now...could someone tell me what herbs go in "poultry seasoning"? :D
I just had my first experience with Seitan yesterday - and I made it myself! I found the recipe here:
http://www.theppk.com/recipes/dbrecipes/index.php?RecipeID=112
It was really easy, I actually cut the recipe in half because I am only cooking for one and it still made a lot! After it cooked I just put it in a non-stick pan with a tiny dash of olive oil and it came out a little like chick*n!
Here is a photo:
Kendrakat, Good for you. That looks like very good seitan. But Yabbitgirl does not have access to vital wheat gluten and that make sthe process much more laborious for her.
Yabbitgirl--there is a recipe on here under seitan cooking school tha that had an interesting combination of spices I used in my last batch. I think one of them was zatar. The seitan had a nice flavor. In my seitan class, me and my partner did not use the mixer but kneaded it by hand. Most of the students kneaded it by hand, but one group used a food processor as an experiment. The instructor said you could use a mixer but we didn't actually do that. I have to say, at some point during the class it occurred to me the whole thing would have been more fun if we had been all having a glass of wine or if we had known each other better or both.
The most incredible seitan I've ever had has been at a restaurant called Candle 79. It's got the most amazing texture--layered, almost like chicken. I've never had seitan like that anywhere else. I don't know how they get it to have that texture. There is a seitan recipe in their cookbook but it is a regular old seitan from scratch recipe. There must be some technique involved but they aren't giving away any secrets!
JKL: You can get "mock chicken" and "duck" in cans from China here, which while not v. tasty, do look Amazingly like poultry meat...they have all the layers of "fibers" and have even pressed the outside on some kind of screen to imitate chicken skin, which I think is kind of gross. I threw a can of it into some chilli (to use it up!) and DH when he tasted it said, "Hey wait a minute, there's MEAT in here!" :D (Indignation from a carnivore, heeeee) When I tried to explain, he protested, "No, look, I can see that it's real meat!"
While I would never go that far as to do the whole skin-texture thing (gross, why would you want to?) I will continue to experiment with seitan. I have googled some make-your-own poultry seasoning and what I've been missing was marjoram! I now have the Latin name for it so some day next week I will go in search of some. Spanish women are not v. adventurous cooks (which means if they didn't learn it from Mom, Grandma or Auntie they don't cook it) so some of the more common spices in the States can be hard to find here, though it's getting better as more and more people migrate here from Asia, Africa and other places. 20 yrs ago you couldn't find chives for love nor money, and dill was hard to get...and let's not have any silly talk about fresh basil! Now they are all rather more common.
I am not an experience seitan maker but I do think I remember seeing a recipe where it was rolled and folded to get that kind of layered, fiberous, meaty texture. I thought it was at vegan lunchbox but I didn't see it there when I searched... maybe it's on here somewhere ... ??
There is a recipe on here where it is stretched thin and then rolled into a ball. Mine came out incredibly dense and rubbery--it was actually the worse seitan I had ever made. But I must have done something wrong.
What exactly is seitan?
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