So what is seitan? Seitan is wheat gluten. This is flour washed until the starches are gone, leaving just protein behind. It’s eaten in SE Asian countries a lot more often than western ones. It’s also known as mianjin, fu, milgogi, wheat meat, or gluten meat. Seitan is extremely high in protein.
One of the reasons that seitan is called “wheat meat” is because you can mimic meat textures with it. Gluten is an incredible building block ingredient. Seitan can imitate just about any meat texture. It’s really fun. Technique is very important though.
If you want lil popcorn chicken bites, you can do that. If you want a meatloaf texture, you can do that. If you want a bacon strip texture, you can do that. If you want a sausage situation, you can do that. Seitan is extremely versatile. I make a vegan musubi loaf that is amazing.
Seitan is creating gluten then cooking it to set it into place. Add flavorings, binders, whatever. This makes seitan incredibly versatile. It’s very fun to play around with. I like to pressure-cook my seitan because it’s easier for me. Some people steam it. However you cook it, make sure to keep it moist. Gluten likes to dry out.
My recipe is from Green Edge Health on Youtube. Here’s a link to the video. I would strongly recommend watching the video because it has some great tips for shaping the dough. Shaping the dough is extremely important because it directly determines the “texture” of your seitan. I can’t stress enough how important technique is here. Please watch a few videos on this.
Quick Tips
- Work quickly. Watch the video a few times. Have everything on hand before you begin. Gluten relaxes which changes how you can work with it. Working swiftly makes this recipe a lot easier.
- Wrap them as tightly as you can. This holds everything in place. You don’t want your seitan expanding or changing shape as it cooks.
- Chicken Texture – Focus on the knots. Keep the dough under as much tension as possible. Keeping it under tension keeps the protein strands long which is what mimics muscle fiber.
- Loaf Texture – Don’t forcus too much on the knotting. Honestly
- You can tweak this recipe a lot. Just remember that if you add a wet ingredient you need to even it out with a dry ingredient.
- I often add soy sauce as well. It really just depends.
Ingredients:
Water 480 mL
Veg Oil 1tbsp
Apple Cider Vinegar 1tbsp
White Miso Paste 2tbsp
Veg Bouillon Concentrate 1tbsp
Pea Protein 70g
Vital Wheat Gluten 240g
Nutritional Yeast 20g
Salt 1tsp
Garlic Powder 2tsp
Onion Powder 1 Tablespoon
White Powder .5tsp
I’m lazy so I throw everything into a 1100w vitamix blender and let ‘er rip. The dough will come together into a pretty shaggy ball. Once it can hold it’s shape we’ll divide up the dough into 4 parts. We’re dividing up the dough so it isn’t as hard on our blender/food processor.
Form a shaggy dough, divide into 4 parts, put 1 part back into the blender/food processor until you get long fibers, about 90 seconds.
I’ve put two videos below. You can see the difference in the dough texture.
Now that we have that stringy gluten going we can put all the dough back together. Stretch the dough into a long strand, then cut it in half. You should be left with two strands like these.
Now we can form them into knotted balls. Keep the tension!
Now we wrap em up. 1 layer parchment paper. 2 layers aluminum foil.
I pressure cook them for ~75 minutes and then let it vent/cool naturally. You should be left with some lil loafs like these. If you look closely you can see the texture and knotting.
Pull it apart however you want and you’re left with something like this.
