Making Seitan

What a mess! (But it was a lot of fun.)

I've been reading a vegetarian cookbook lately--it's called 366 Healthful Ways to Cook Tofu and Other Meat Alternatives--and I came across something called seitan. It's a meat alternative with a decent amount of protein, and you can make it yourself pretty cheaply, and apparently it can substitute for meat so that people hardly notice. You can make things like Seitan Cutlets (like Chicken Cutlets--breaded and sauteed--but no chicken) or Seitan Bourguignon (like a beef stew). It seemed worth trying, so I set about making seitan this afternoon.

You start with wheat flour (I used 6 cups), and then you add a little less than half that amount of water, and make a ball of dough which you knead for 5 minutes. Don't flour and water make paste? That's what it felt like. It definitely wasn't like dough, so I'm not sure how you really knead it. Mostly I ended up squishing it through my fingers. I tried to scrape the last bits of dry flour out of the bottom of the bowl, but my hands were so coated with paste that I didn't have much success with that.

I would have taken a picture of the process, but if I had tried, I would have ruined the camera.

The next step was to run water over the dough, which also allowed me to get all the goop off my hands, and leave it alone (covered with water) for 15 minutes. Now it looked like this:

 

The 15-minute interlude gave me time to get out the stove and the pot . You fill the pot with water and add some seasonings. I didn't have most of what the book recommended, but I did have half an onion and half a clove of garlic, and I also added some soy sauce and a dash of powdered ginger to approximate what was recommended.

Back to the dough. You stick your hands in the water and start kneading (or squishing) the dough again. The water will turn white. When it does, you pour it down the drain, add more warm or cold water, and knead some more. Rinse and repeat until the water doesn't turn white any more. This took me about 20 minutes. As I kept doing this, the dough got stranger and stranger.

First it held together in a lump:

 

 

Then it started to look like brains:



Then it got too stringy to look like brains, and too stretchy to knead, so I had to pull it apart to knead it:



Finally I decided I was done and I drained the last bit of water. Now it's raw seitan:



Then I cut it into four pieces:



Apparently seitan should be poached right after you make it (cooked over low heat for an hour), and then you can cook it for whatever you want to use it for (or freeze it in liquid). I had the cooking liquid ready, so I turned the stove on. A few minutes later, I realized that it didn't do any good to turn the stove on when I hadn't plugged it in yet:



Finally I got the cooking water heated to almost boiling, added the raw seitan, put on the lid (not because of the recipe, but because my stove works better that way), and decided it was time for dinner. Leftovers!

After dinner I finally decided it had cooked enough, so I took it out of the pot:



Then I bagged it and left it out to cool, and later I'll put it in the freezer. Tomorrow I'll decide what I want to make with it.

I also started thinking about my poor sink. The kneading underwater process gets out the starch and bran from the dough, so a lot of starch and bran went down the drain. I really did try to wipe some of it out, but there was so much of it! I think I'll give the sink a dose of baking soda and vinegar tonight. That should clear out the drain, and besides, it's so fun to watch it bubble.