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... ::)
bake 'em to dry them out a bit and dice to use in a mock-chix salad
or (credit to davedrum here) lightly bread in cornmeal and pan fry in a little oil.
When I first tried home-made seitan my reaction was, "wow I never really missed the pieces of fried mystery meat on the Chinese buffet line..." but the cornmeal breading was enough to make a believer out of me.
I used the diced baked pieces in a curried chix salad with apples, currants, and celery. Give it another shot before you throw in the towel. Good luck!
There's a lot you can do with the seitan once you make it.
I sometimes slice it, and let in marinate in Annie's BBQ sauce for a few hours (leave a little broth in the baking pan so it does not get too dry..like a 1/4" or so). I cover it with foil, and bake it at 350 for about 15-20 minutes, then I take off the foil for the last five. I use a convection oven which cooks faster, so with a conventional oven I would say bake it for at least 1/2 an hour.
You can also get fajita seasonings, slice the seitan and make awesome fajitas! (which goes great with margaritas)! :D
Use the slices to make "Philly cheeze steaks", or any type of sandwich.
When I make seitan I sometimes make them into "meatballs" to add to pasta, rice, or to make a sandwich.....there lots of types of sauces and gravy's to play with and try.
The thing with seitan is that it will absorb the spices or sauces you want really quickly and easily.
Nutdragon, I do like the sound of mock chix salad and, the curried one is something I HAVE to make when I get back home....sounds really really yummy! ;)
Thanks nutdragon! I'm definitely going to try that. I was ready to quit. Every time I made it, it came out so yucky! I'm definitely going to bake it and try to make a chik salad! Thanks a bunch! ;D
So when this came back up the other day I re-noticed Baypuppy's instructions and I got inspired. We had some fantastic seitan last night and this is what I did:
1) Dave's recipe from earlier
2) I checked the ellenskitchen link and she suggested somewhere in there to put 1/4C molasses in the boiling broth (OMG! DO IT!!)
3) Baypuppy's suggestion about the slow cooker is a stroke of genius. You just forget about it; the house smells wonderful and then it's ready.
4) Then my creativity died off and I cooked it the way I did last time (cornmeal in the skillet and chix salad), but we had friends over for dinner (omni's) and I caught one snagging chunks and dipping them in the nut. yeast gravy while we were cleaning up. He actually said it was the best part of the meal (and I made coleslaw and everybody always loves my coleslaw). There were no left overs. (I didn't share the chx salad, it belongs to me!)
The texture was perfect, not chewy, perfect.
One of the many reasons why I love vegweb! Thanks guys! :)
Thank you J.R., Nutdragon, Baypuppy, nekromantikk, and Davedrum. I truly appreciate your help. Everyone here has been so helpful. I'll definitely take all your guys advice and try again. I'll let you know how it goes! Thanks so much! :D I love vegweb! ;D
my seitan always tastes like crap. i have almost given up on making it
I was reading the previous thread. I thought "I can make this." Until I got to the store (Trader Joe's!!!) and they did not have vital wheat gluten. I bought whole wheat flour. Can I use this? Please help! I want to make this tonight for dinner!
No, the only thing you can make seitan with is vital wheat gluten... You can get it at most grocery stores - its does not surprise me that TJ did not have it... They don't have a lot of things like that... Look in a larger grocery store near the other products by "Bob's Red Mill" as they make vital wheat gluten... Good luck!
Yeah you can make it from WWF. I make seitan all the time from Vital Wheat Gluten, but thought I'd be daring and try to make it from scratch using a recipe from here. All I have to say is that whatever it was that I finally ended up with....it certainly was not seitan! :D
http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=11687.0
I too am very surprised that your Trader Joe's did not have Vital Wheat Gluten. Every supermarket usually sells it with the baking supplies. A lot of baking/bread recipes call for it, so it's a fairly common item. Even Wally World ( I mean Walmart) sells it.
Good Luck, and let us know the results if you try it from scratch!
Oops sorry I was wrong I guess you can use WWF! I thought I had read that you could only use vital wheat gluten... It is really not that hard to make - and the end result is awesome! I think I will make some tonight! Happy cooking ;D
For most of the last 25 years, at least, the tradition in our family for our Thanksgiving meal was Barbecued Gluten Ribs made using the recipe in the Farm Cookbook. The recipe to make the gluten did, indeed, use whole wheat flour. It has been just in the past few months (after Thanksgiving) that I even tried making seitan with vital wheat gluten and, let me tell you, the vital wheat gluten is so, so much easier, less time consuming, and doesn't use so much water; plus the result is not as tough.
The rinsing used to take me an hour at least and I had the water on the whole time. It got to the point where I was NOT happy about wasting that much water or watching all the bran and starch go down the drain so the last several years, instead of making gluten ribs from scratch, I used the meat analog Veat. Unfortunately, Veat has whey protein in it. However, now that I've met vital wheat gluten, I can make the Barbecued Gluten Ribs using that and not have to break my back and use so much water rinsing or eat something with a dairy-derived product in it.
Thanks everyone! I will make the Seitan using Vital Wheat Gluten, once I find some. My husband looked at our local grocery store and they did not have. But I assume that Whole Foods will have it. I just don't feel like seperating the starch from it, especially since I've never made it. I'd like to know if I like it before I take the time to do all that work. I think in its place I will make polenta and do something with that instead. Thanks again!
Okay, so my daughter made Seitan O'Greatness (google it if you haven't seen it) yesterday and it turned out perfectly. It was so good she ate the whole thing between yesterday and today. A few minutes ago she started making another one with only minor changes in the way she made the last one, even using the same batch of vital wheat gluten but the gluten didn't hold together. She couldn't even knead it. Does anyone have any ideas about what could have gone wrong? ???
It was way too wet and wouldn't hold together. Sounds like the opposite problem with a similar result. She added more gluten flour then just put it in the foil and baked it. When the 90 minutes were up she said it was huge (popped out of the foil wrap), heavy, and still very wet. She was going to put it back in the oven without the foil to see if it would dry out some. I've made it twice myself and had great success each time. It never occurred to me that it wouldn't be consistent. I'm at a loss to figure out what could have gone wrong. And now I'm nervous about trying it again myself. :o
I'm not sure what went wrong yours, but it sounded great so I got the recipe from ppk and it's in the oven now. It seemed to go together okay. I'm sorry your current batch didn't turn out. Do you think something went wrong with the measuring?
Sounds like what happened to me when I tried to make Dragonfly's seitan ribs. I was in a bit of a hurry for some stupid reason (stupid because unnecessary, I just rushed) and I dumped the full amount of water in at once without waiting to see if it would be too much. Next time I must be a bit gentler with it, I think, add about 2/3 of the amount and start mixing and add the rest as needed. Maybe that would be the problem?
Silly thought, but my cooking really seems to respond to my emotional state at the time...if I'm upset or agitated it doesn't work nearly as well. Maybe she wasn't quite as calm as usual the second time?
She was making it at the end of a cooking session where she had made several other things, but she wasn't hurrying or stressed. I spoke to her later and she said it looked better after she let it cook some without the foil but she hadn't tried any of it. She wasn't going to have any of it until today. I'll report back.
Humboldt_Honey, hope you like it. There are a couple of recipe variations, of course, depending on whose site you went to for the recipe. The first time I made it, there was entirely too much heat for me (but my husband and others loved it) so I made a few modifications in the next batch and it was much more to my liking. The best part is that baking it makes for a much more pleasant texture than boiling it. I don't think I'll ever boil any again.
The best part is that baking it makes for a much more pleasant texture than boiling it. I don't think I'll ever boil any again.
I have to agree with you, baked seitan is much munchier in my opinion. The boiled just seems like styrofoam packing in terms of texture.
When i made seitan, i definitely did not like the texture, even after I cubed it and baked it in the oven. I also did not like how I flavored it. This sounds like it has more flavor added to it, so it will be less soggy and more spicy. I am going to try it one night this week. I still have a HUGE bag of vital wheat gluten that I didn't know what I'd do with since I hated the first Seitan I made.
It's a terrific recipe. Just beware that cooked according to most variations of the recipe it is VERY hot (2 t. black pepper, 1/4 t. cayenne) so if you have issues with "heat" cut it back a little. The heat builds the more you eat it, too. The first couple of bites tasted great to me but I ended up not being able to finish mine. In my second batch I cut back to 1 t. black pepper and used paprika instead of cayenne. There was a hint of heat but it was not hot. It all ends up being very salami-pepperoni-ish so if you like that kind of thing you will probably like this.
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