Seitan (homemade) and recipes to use it

[Gaelen]

Seitan recipes


Basic Homemade Seitan -- 30g protein, 7g ECC per serving
Links to all kinds of Seitan recipes from Recipezaar, Ellen's Kitchen and more. Recipes include things like barbeque seitan, gluten roasts, breaded seitan and more.

[Gaelen]

This is my basic seitan recipe. I usually use vegetable stock, but you can also simmer in seafood, beef, chicken, pork or curry stock.

Quick Homemade Seitan -- 30g protein, 7 g ECC (11g - 4g fiber)

Recipe By : Gaelen
Serving Size : 8 Preparation Time : about 90 minutes
Categories : vegetarian, seitan

Amount Measure Ingredient -- Preparation Method
-------- ------------ --------------------------------
2 cups vital wheat gluten (NOT 'high gluten flour!)
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 1/4 cups Pacific Organics vegetable broth (or any other broth that has 3g ECC per cup or less)
3 Tablespoons tamari soy sauce -- or Braggs liquid amino acids, or regular soy sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil -- toasted

Broth:
4 cups water
1/4 cup tamari soy sauce
1 piece kombu -- (3 inch)
3 slices fresh ginger -- (3 to 4)

Add garlic powder and ginger to vital wheat gluten and stir. Mix liquids together and add to flour mixture all at once. Mix vigorously with a fork. When it forms a stiff dough, knead it 10 to 15 times.

Let the dough rest 2 to 5 minutes, then knead it a few more times. Let it rest another 15 minutes before proceeding.

Cut gluten into 8 pieces and stretch into thin cutlets. Simmer in broth for 30 to 60 minutes. This recipe makes 1-1/4 to 1-1/2 pounds or 2 to 2-1/2 cups of seitan; one piece is a serving. You can also cut the seitan into smaller pieces; when I do this I usually get around 16-18 nugget sized pieces, and 2 pieces is one serving.

For Broth: Combine water, tamari, kombu piece and fresh ginger in a large
saucepan. Bring broth to a boil. Add cutlets one at a time. Reduce heat to
barely simmer when saucepan is covered. Seitan may be used, refrigerated
in the broth, or frozen with a bit of the broth in the package for
moistness at this point.

Cooked seitan can be chopped, ground, shredded or sliced when using in recipes. It can also be grilled after the simmering process, and treated just like barbecue. Enjoy!

Yield: 8 pieces
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Per Serving : 145 Calories; 1g Fat (3.5% calories from fat); 30g Protein; 11g Carbohydrate; 4g Dietary Fiber; 0mg Cholesterol; 967mg Sodium. Exchanges: 0 Grain(Starch); 0 Lean Meat; 1/2 Vegetable; 0 Fat.

[Gaelen]

Here are links to several sites with seitan recipes:

http://www.vrg.org/recipes/vjseitan.htm
Seitan Stew
Seitan Barbeque
Seitan and Shiitake Stroganoff (I just skip the noodles...)
Mock pulled pork

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/chicken-seitan/detail.aspx
Chicken Seitan

http://www.ellenskitchen.com/recipebox/glutpnut.html
Gluten Roasts recipes (various) from Ellen's Kitchen

http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/seitanrecipes.htm
Stews, Roasts and Breaded Seitan patties

http://www.theppk.com/recipes/dbrecipes/recipe.php?RecipeID=112
Isa's homemade seitan recipes

http://www.recipezaar.com/recipes.php?q=Seitan+recipe
Too many seitan recipes to count (612 the last time I checked) from Recipezaar. Not all are low carb, but all can give you ideas.

[Grandma Moe]

Oh Gaelen,

When I tried this recipe, it came out with a texture like clams. (Great for when I WANT clams and one day, I'm sure I WILL as I can now think about what I could do to my chowder recipe to make it LC. I'll still be checking out those other sites.

My hubby searched and searched and found this recipe from The Country Kitchen Collection Cookbook. I did tweak it a bit by only using whole wheat flour and making it extra fine in my Blendtec "super blender". I think it is so much better than the first try at this. It has a few more ingredients but I could not believe the difference in texture. I can eat this chopped up in stew or sliced for stir fry. I think it is great. Here is the recipe :

Seitan -- Pronounced SAY-tan, ( or in our house we just call it our devil meat.)

2 c. vital wheat gluten
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup minute tapioca (secret ingredient)
2 T nutritional yeast
1 1/2 Tbs Chicken style seasoning ( I used powdered bullion and about a tsp of poultry seasoning)
1 1/2 TBS garlic powder
Mix all ingredients well

combine 1/8 c. soy sauce
1 5/8 c. water

mix wet and dry ingredients very quickly and knead into a loaf.
put in plastic bag and chill in freezer for a few hours, or just freeze for later.

Remove from freezer and let thaw enough to slice in to 1/4 inch thick patties. Stretch them a little thinner with your fingers, (like you would for fried bread).

Cook gluten in this broth:
8 cups of water
1 large onion
fresh minced garlic to taste ( I used about 4 little cloves)
1/2 c. soy sauce
2 Tbs nutritional yeast
3 Tbs. chicken style seasoning

Bring broth to a boil on high and add gluten one slice at a time. Lower heat to medium after all the gluten is added. Put a lid on it and let cook in the broth for an hour.

After it is cooked you can slice for stir fry or cut it up for stew. What ever you want to use it for. I just ate one and they tasle just like salsbury steak. I think this is a candidate for, "Moe" MacDonald's "LC" McRibs. (Remember how weird those were when you were expecting real ribs?).

I even put some through my meat grinder and I find it to be every bit as good and the really expensive "Quorn" stuff you can buy. I even think it compares to "WhiteWave" brand seitan that you can buy for about $5 for 8 oz.

Thanks so much for finding me that recipe, anyway. It was so nice of you to go to the trouble. Did you have better luck when you made it? Maybe I did something wrong.

It is a cheaper recipe by far so if I did something wrong let me know.

I made biscuits with part lentil flour the yesterday. They were really excellent right out of the oven. They were only OK the next day. I made them like my original recipe only I substituted half of the oat flour for the lentil flour.

Man that Blendtec is one neat toy. That flour I made was as soft as white flour. take care, moe

[Gaelen]

Moe, I do have pretty good luck with the basic recipe, but it's kind of like making good bread--I think you do develop a 'touch' for the seitan in the kneading process and some of the right 'feel' just becomes instinctive. Gnocchi are the same way...after a few batches, mine never fell apart or were too wet, but those first couple batches weren't pretty.

Did you figure out a carb count for your recipe? Seems like it would be higher with the added whole wheat flour and tapioca...

[Grandma Moe]

Tapioca adds 33.5 ecccs to the recipe and the ww flour adds 72.5 . That is 106 eccs for 20 large quarter pounder sized steaks. 5 + (7 each if yours makes 20 large steaks) or 12 carbs each is actually acceptable to me.

But if I understand you then if I had clam textured seitan I probably kneaded it too much. You think I can still get results that honestly taste like salsbury steaks if I just keep working with the basic recipe?

take care, moe

[cmcole]

If I remember correctly, the wheat "meat" I made was done by first adding a fair amount of water to whole wheat flour (with or without added gluten flour) and mixing it together until it formed a "lump", which separated out the bran, etc. I remember you had to change the water a few times, and then, when you had the product, THEN you added whatever seasonings were needed to create the particular fake meat product.

http://www.amazon.ca/How-Make-Meat-Wheat-International/dp/0892561262/sr=8-2/qid=1168256722/ref=sr_1_2/702-4734196-1790420?ie=UTF8&s=books

http://hillbillyhousewife.com/seitan.htm


I discovered wheat-meat in the mid '80's. I found a book at the library by Nina & Michael Shandler called "How to Make all the Meat You Eat Out of Wheat". I took that book home, read it from cover to cover and began my experimentations. I can honestly say that my early work with wheat-meat was barely edible. Creating wheat-meat was a complicated process that afforded me too many avenues of failure.
Back in the 80's the only way to get wheat gluten was by rinsing the starch and bran out of flour. This is a time consuming, but relatively easy process. Whole wheat flour and water are combined to form a stiff dough. Then the dough is allowed to rest for a bit. Finally it is kneaded under slow running water until all of the starch and bran wash away. Most methods recommend the starch and bran be saved and used to make crackers, ice cream, and bread. The stringy, rubbery gluten that is left is then simmered in a savory broth for an hour or two to make it firm and give it flavor.
I always had trouble getting all of the starch and bran out of the gluten, and I was confused about how to cook it because all the books I read said it could be cooked so many different ways. There wasn't any consensus on which methods gave the best results. I tried one method after the other, from baking to steaming to frying and simmering. My results were inconsistant at best.
Then I discovered Wheat Gluten Flour, or Vital Wheat Gluten. Gluten flour has all of the starch and bran already removed. Only the pure protein of the gluten remains. Gluten flour may be combined with regular tap water and instantly, you have raw gluten. No more kneading or rinsing under cold water. No more frustration with spongy wheat-meat. Wheat-meat is easy and convenient to make all of a sudden, which paves the road for a great deal of rejoicing and gratitude.
I buy my gluten flour in bulk at my local Co-op. I've seen it in small boxes in the baking aisles of larger grocery stores, and natural food stores too. Since there is no rinsing and very little kneading involved, the likelihood of success is much greater.
The standard method with gluten flour is to combine 1 cup of Vital Wheat Gluten & 3/4 cup of water or flavorful broth. Stir the two together until they make a nice rubbery dough. There now you have raw wheat gluten. Boy, that was easy wasn't it? The traditional way of cooking gluten is to simmer it very gently in a liquid seasoned with soy sauce, Kombu (a sea vegetable), and a hunk of ginger. Slow simmering is a MUST. If the gluten boils then you will have spongy, bread-like wheat-meat instead of firm chewy wheat-meat. When you are pressed for time, Crock-pots and Slow Cookers offer the perfect environment for this type of cooking.
Wheat-Meat has very little flavor of it's own, much like tofu. You must give it flavor by simmering and marinating it in a highly seasoned broth. The flavor of the broth is up to you. You can make your own seasoned broth using soy sauce or vegetarian flavored broth powders. Many are available including ham, chicken, vegetable and beef style flavors.

[Gaelen]

CM, yes, that is the old, "Farm Vegetarian" cookbook method...basically you are kneading out all of the starch and rinsing it away. Using vital wheat gluten cuts the prep time and the amount of kneading.

And Moe, yes, I do think you can get a better texture--just knead with a light touch and knead less. But your recipe certainly has an acceptable ECC per serving, so if it's working for you, I'd go with it. ;)

[petra65]

Gaelen: what is kombu?

[Gaelen]

Kombu (sometimes called konbu) is a type of seaweed which, dried, is used to flavor stock in Japanese cooking. You can usually get it in the seaweed section (I'm not kidding...there's a seaweed section!) at your natural foods or Asian market.

And if you drop a piece of kombu into cooking soybeans, it helps soften them faster during cooking (something about the enzymes in the seaweed.)

[petra65]

We have an asian market here so I'm sure I can get it if I want it.

I was just noticing you don't have any lamb recipes. Am I the only lamb fan?

[Gaelen]

I've got some of my own, and I'm sure Mitra does, too...but I admit, I haven't posted any. If you've got some, by all means, fill up the category!

[Mitra]

Yes, I have several lamb recipes. I can post some if you're interested.

[petra65]

Yes please Mitra. I made a Bobby Flay recipe tonight for dinner. It was good. Marinade with mint, parsley, lemon, garlic, then grilled the lamb.