FitWit-LA: Adventures with Seitan

I'm not vegan. I never have been and most likely never will be (for more than maybe, a week). In fact, I'm not even vegetarian.

I love chicken, and fish, and a good al pastor taco. I was raised by a French mother who made sure traces of brie cheese and saucisson (which I didn't know was actually called 'salami' until I was about 10) ran in my blood at all times. I'm addicted to ice cream, and while I can respect a good soy ice version, you will never get me to give up hazelnut gelato. Ever.

But it's for these reasons I actually really, really enjoy vegan food. There's something so mysterious about a dish that can taste so good while being devoid of all the things that conventional cooking and baking consider 'essentials'. Butter. Milk. Cheese. Bacon. It's fascinating, really. They make cheese out of nuts! They squeeze milk out of beans! They make a substance easily mistakable for meat out of gluten they've squeezed out of wheat and then turned into flour! C'mon, that's gotta easily rival some feats of molecular gastronomy.

This uber-geekiness about food-swap chemistry has given me a serious itch to learn how it all works. I've recently added 4 vegan/veggie cookbooks to my collection, and after spending some time reading through them and picking up the basics, one of the recipes that caught my eye was for seitan.

I've eaten seitan plenty of times, but it would have never occurred to me that it was something I could make at home. Au contraire! This stuff is amazingly simple and consists of a mere two ingredients. It's not the prettiest method of madness, but it's essentially foolproof and can take your veggie home cooking a million different directions.

Last night, the curiosity took over. And so my Adventure with Seitan commenced:

(recipe courtesy of Mark Bittman)

1 cup vital wheat gluten flour
3/4 cup water
1/2 cup soy sauce
6 cups vegetable stock or water

Put 1 cup of vital wheat gluten in a bowl or food processor. Add 3/4 cup of water and stir or pulse until all flour and water is incorporated. The result will be a big rubbery ball of mass tinted something kind of grayish yellow and certainly not appetizing.

Knead (for what it's worth) for 5 minutes by hand. Apparently this part is very crucial even though you'll constantly be thinking This can't possibly be doing anything beneficial. It is. Or so they say. Once you're finished, place the ball in a bowl covered with a towel to rest for 20-30 minutes.

Once the ball is done resting, take it out and cut it into two separate pieces. Pull and stretch out each portion into a log-like mass as best you can. Don't worry about visuals here. They're not going to be pretty no matter how you try.

Next mix up a the veggie stock or water with the 1/2 cup soy sauce in a pot. For 'golden' seitan, mix the stock with 1/2 cup white wine or apple juice and a little salt if you're using water instead of stock.Place both pieces into the liquid and bring liquid to a boil before reducing heat to a low simmer. Cover and cook for about an hour, turning over a couple times in the process. Once the hour is up, let the seitan fully cool while still in the liquid.

Store seitan in a sealed container with some of the liquid until ready to use.

My attempt didn't come out much prettier than what you see above (yes, that's two blobs, not one).

After a day of rest I removed it from its liquid container and sliced up a few pieces for some Seitan Fajitas:

-Slice off an appropriate portion of seitan and pat down to remove some of the liquid.
-Saute one green + one red bell pepper + half an onion in a bit of olive oil until the peppers soften and the onion starts becoming translucent.

-Add the seitan, cut into pieces.
-Sprinkle on cumin and chili powder (about a tsp). Saute until onions and seitan are both slightly browned.