Cooking with Seitan

Whenever I mention 'seitan' I’m often faced with a bewildered look and joke relating to 'Satan'. I mean, It’s not exactly a popular ingredient, particularly amongst those who eat meat as it’s often used as a meat replacement. In Layman's terms, and explained nicely by wiki 'Wheat gluten (in which seitan derives from) is a food made from gluten, the main protein of wheat. It is made by washing wheat flour dough with water until all the starch granules have been removed, leaving the sticky insoluble gluten as an elastic mass which is then cooked before being eaten.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_gluten_(food)


The first time I tried seitan must have been when I went to the infamous “Temple of Seitan” in Hackney. This was my first experience with 'vegan fried chicken' I suppose you could say. I was never a massive fan of KFC where when I did eat meat so I can’t say I had my hopes set too high, but I’m always open to trying out new eateries, especially when I’m in London. If anything, I preferred it to the ‘real deal’. The texture was a lot less slimy and greasy than the fired chicken I had been used to.

So, as you can imagine I was over the moon when I found out ‘vegan chicken schnitzels’ were on the menu when I returned home from work. Unfortunately things didn’t go quite to plan and what I was presented with was in fact a dish that somewhat resembled bread rolls... made from brick (sorry mum).

With seitan on the brain, I knew I had to give it a go myself. I followed the below recipe, tweaking seasoning here and there etc etc.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E330wyf4otY

The results were surprisingly okay considering it was my first time using this slightly bizarre ingredient. The texture was slightly chewy but maybe that comes with practice on how much to knead etc. I would also mention that seasoning is key. I felt as though the seitan absorbed quite a lot of flavour so was ever so slightly bland considering how much seasoning was used. Nonetheless,  I’ll definitely be using this again, maybe next time to make a Katsu curry... or just perfecting the basics.