At War With Seitan - A Basic Seitan Recipe with Pics

Seitan... oh lord seitan. After years of reading recipes, blogs, watching videos, and making boiled seitan, I feel as though I have finally found consistency when it comes to making seitan. This post is for those who have struggled with texture – whether it be too gooey, too doughy, or problems with getting it to expand properly. Several little tricks have been have been suggested (use some soy or chick pea flour, start with cold water, etc.,) some of which have been useful, some not so much. After many practice runs of getting greatly varied results, I've settled on this process to produce consistent, well-textured and tasty seitan. I generally use Bob's Red Mill Vital Wheat Gluten and whatever Nutritional Yeast is available. The recipe/ process I use is built off of Bittman's recipe from “How to Cook Vegetarian,” but there are some helpful changes which I have added.

Time: 1 hour 30 minutes, mostly unattended

Difficulty: not bad, but can occasionally be frustrating – results can occasionally vary

Ingredients:

1 cup vital wheat gluten

1/3 cup of nutritional yeast

seasonings as needed (1 tsp. liquid smoke or soy sauce is a great place to start, though spice and flavorings can be used in any way )

apx. ¾ cup of cold water or vegetable broth (oddly, this is a place you will need to adjust depending on the dough's absorption of the liquid)

Stock pot (the larger the better) filled with veggie broth

Process:

1. Mix vital wheat gluten, nutritional yeast and dry seasonings (whisk works well) in a small mixing bowl.
2. Add wet ingredients (the cold liquid seems to help with the texture in the long run,) mix with fork
3. Knead for a minute or 2 (you may need to add more liquid or gluten – the texture at this point should be slightly gummier than Play-doh)
4. Leave sit for about 20 minutes.
5. At this point, you have to make a decision – do you want loaves or medallions? This will depend on what seitan dish you will be creating. If you choose loaves, divide the seitan into 2 roughly equal pieces. You can roll between your hands for a minute to shape, though it will be quite sticky.
   Should you choose to want smaller pieces, often referred to as medallions on other sites and cookbooks, use a knife or tear seitan into very small (a little larger than a thumbnail) pieces. This will take a little time (5-10 minutes.)
6. Place seitan into the large stock pot, filled with cold vegetable stock. Starting with cold stock (straight from the fridge) was recently suggested and has lead to much better consistency.
7. Bring to a rolling boil. Reduce heat to a boil, cover. Stir or flip on occasion (every twenty minutes or so.) Boil for 1 hour.

1. Dry ingredients

2. Wet ingredients mixed

3. Post-knead/ pre-boiled

4. Boiling

Storing and other stuff:

Once the seitan has cooled, you can store and refrigerate for a little over a week, though I will take it out every few days and re-boil it. I won't swear this is a necessity, but I have had stock go bad in the past, and I have read about moldy seitan as well.  As we post other recipes, we will let you know what works in terms of textures for specific dishes. However, 2 things you will likely do for many dishes is to either oven bake (to dehydrate a bit,) or pan-fry. When I first started making seitan, I was always disappointed that I could not achieve the textures I've found at many of the great restaurants of the veg-world. The two-aforementioned techniques have really helped significantly.