My Adventures with Seitan (or Devilish Turds)

After posting yesterday, I went straight to the kitchen and got to work on making seitan. I followed Mark Bittman's instructions to the letter and hoped for the best. He warned the reader not to be surprised at how quickly the "dough" comes together. It was shocking. Kind of like a science experiment. Not only did it come together quickly, it seized up into a globule that looked like something that might have been on the set of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Another head-scratcher was the fact that Bittman's recipe (as well as others found on the internet) says to knead it for 10 minutes. It's kind of a sick joke to ask the preparer to knead when the consistency of seitan resembles dried-out rubber cement that has formed itself into a monkey brain. Jesse put it a little more delicately by declaring that our soon-to-be dinner looked like "butt boogers" (great).

I tried to knead (unsuccessfully) and then finally put it aside to let it rest and relax for 20 minutes. While resting the rubber dough I made the cooking broth, which is pretty much water, some soy sauce, and a little spice. After the resting period, I was instructed to "stretch and roll the dough into logs." And I did. I put it down on the cutting board and started giggling. And then I started laughing so hard that I could barely catch my breath. Jesse couldn't understand what could be so funny about dinner and ran over to the kitchen. I was finally able to blurt out "oh god it looks like poo! YAY!" I rolled out the other lump and with tears running down my cheek from laughter, sliced the turds into medallions, and flattened them as much as I could.

After all of that work, I was determined to make something of the meal and went ahead and put the medallions to simmer in the broth. They bubbled and rolled and were generally weird looking. Luckily, after looking at the stuff floating in liquid for 30 minutes my expectations for the final product were pretty low. Thankfully, I hadn't hoped for a miracle to happen because they tasted like bland, rubbery, pieces of nothing.

We both kept tasting the slices of seitan and just shook our heads wondering how this could possibly be classified as food? I felt really let down, but Jesse had a brilliant idea. We threw the seitan into our little food chopper until it was the consistency of ground beef. Then, I sauteed it with black beans, onions, bell pepper, some leftover homemade enchilada sauce and spices as a filling for our tacos. Surprisingly, it was really tasty! It was a clean out the fridge night, so we also threw in a little leftover rice. I loved the tacos -- as did Jesse.

I think seitan will definitely be a refrigerator/freezer staple if we need a quick substitute for ground meat. However, I don't think we'll have seitan steaks anytime soon. I want to continute to play around with cooking methods to see if I can make it a little more palatable to have in stir-frys or maybe even on salads. I still have enough vital wheat gluten for 3 or 4 more batches.