Credit: Jeanette Watson
Seitan, amusingly pronounced 'Satan', is made from wheat flour. The seitan fundamentalists make it by the Wash The Flour method, ie white flour is washed and washed and washed to remove the starch, so that one ends up only with the gluten. The process is known to the cognoscenti as the WTF method. In a vulgar age, this is a rather unfortunate set of initials; on the other hand, considering that my boat is a white-flour-free zone and that this method takes an inordinate amount of time and effort, I can't help feeling that the alternative meaning of the abbreviaton is not inappropriate As WTF also uses vast amounts of water, it isn't at all suitable for voyagers, and I merely include it for reasons of completeness and also to elucidate readers, should they come across the initials and be bemused. Apparently when you make it from scratch, you can produce a stringy
seitan that really approximates the texture of chicken. But why bother?
Let's just take it on its own values as in interesting extra choice in
our repertoire: we veg~ans are generally quite happy with an honest, plant-based diet, and have no burning necessity to fool ourselves that we are eating dead animals.
Far easier, and as far as I can make out, just as effective, is simply to buy the vital wheat gluten from your local nutters' shop or online. Probably, in some places, you can even buy it in supermarkets. It keeps very well, so if you become a fan of the stuff, you might do well to stock up with it when it's available, because it's not exactly a mainstream product.
I'm besotted with seitan recipes (they are still something of a novelty!) and wholeheartedly recommend that you give it a try. While I can't
say I've ever really missed the consistency of meat, the charming thing about seitan is that it has a
completely different texture from most other veg~an food and while, in truth, it doesn't really resemble meat - at least mine doesn't - I do enjoy the
chewiness of seitan and the fact that, unless it's cut up very small,
you really need a knife and fork to deal with it. Seitan is a really good
additional string to the veg~an's bow, assuming you aren't gluten
intolerant!
It is even more approprate to the small-income, voyaging vegetarian because it is one of those foodstuffs that seems to have been designed for such people - at least its base product, vital wheat gluten, is. It’s cheap, it's compact, it's easy to stow, it doesn't need refrigeration, it lasts indefinitely (although, in the Tropics, I'd probably add my meths-soaked piece of tissue paper to the container), it needs no special skills or tools to transform the vital wheat gluten into seitan and making ‛meat’
with it is quick. I would say that its only drawback is that you have to look for it: however, the compensation for this is its long shelf life.
I have to confess that, try as I might, I can't get
enthusiastic about either tofu or tempeh. If the recipe really needs
tofu, I make some from chickpea flour ('Burmese tofu'), but in most cases,
seitan is a fine substitute for either of them. It is much easier to flavour than tofu, because instead of having to press the tofu, cut it up and then soak it for hours in (ineffective) marinades, you can simply add the
herbs and/or spices to the flour when you mix up the dough. There's no worry about the marinade spilling and there's no wasted liquid to deal with (which usually means throw away). Your seasonings completely permeate the seitan, rather than (if you're lucky) seeping in for a couple of millimetres and thus each bite is really delicious.
Seitan also makes brilliant
burgers and sausages, a very acceptable 'steak' (at least to those of us
who haven't bitten into a piece of beef for over a decade!) and is
excellent in such things as butter chicken curry. This makes
it a really useful choice when you're feeding people
who are sceptical about veg~an food. If the conversation is sufficiently entertaining, I doubt that many people would even suspect that the 'meat' in their curry
is something quite different.
To use it, you mix fairly small amounts of the gluten (for some reason always referred to as Vital Wheat Gluten) - about 1/4 cup per person - with flavourings and various other ingredients, depending on what sort of result you want. Online sources make a huge fuss about how difficult it is to clean up after yourself. Because the word 'gluten' is from the same root as 'glue', etymologically, they do have a point. However, maybe it's the ubiquity of the dishwasher ashore, but for some reason nobody seems ever to suggest soaking the tools and bowls in cold water, which instantly resolves the problem of sticky dough. The best method is to ensure you use up all the dough you've made, by carefully scraping bowls and mixing tools clean. I have yet to have a problem with cleaning up bowls, tools, counter or cloths and am not sure what all the hysteria is about. However, the mixed seitan can be very tenacious when it comes to porous surfaces, so I'd think twice about swiping a messy counter with a damp cloth: it could end up a real mission trying to clean it!
The basic proportions for making seitan are 1/4 cup of water to 1/2 cup flour. However, this is somewhat excessively basic and the following recipe is a more appropriate basic 'chicken' recipe.
Basic 'chicken' seitan
Before
we go any further, and at the risk of shattering all your hopes and
illusions, this seitan doesn’t taste remotely like chicken. I say this
as someone who hasn’t eat chicken for well over a decade, but for
all that, I say it with some certainty. I don’t want anyone to be
disappointed.
This is the one to
use if you are copying a tofu recipe: add the seasoning suggested for the marinade (if
any) to the dry ingredients. This 'chicken' can also be used to
replace beans and chickpeas in various recipes or even to replace the meat in a
well-flavoured chicken dish. However, I wouldn't recommend serving a
slab of it on a plate, with roast potatoes, two veg and gravy!
'Chicken' seitan and spinach in Indian creamy sauce - Malai palak
In the
original, the soy curls are marinaded and then baked. I think
marinades are unseamanlike underway, as well as being wasteful.
Certainly, I don’t find it makes much difference to seitan and in fact you get infinitely
better results from
incorporating the flavours into the seitan in the first place. This
is what I’ve done in this recipe. As for baking - I assume many small
income voyagers stil lsail without ovens and even those who do, will
probabaly avoid using them because of the cost - and the fact that they
heat up the cabin.
I
use ginger paste and garlic
paste in my ‛Indian’ cooking. If you prefer to use finely minced
ginger and garlic, go ahead. I'm not sure that this is really a Curry
For Cooks, in spite the use of ingredients being pretty authentic: most
boats would probably have them on board. The only exception is the
methi and if you don't have it you can leave it out.
Chorizo
This recipe
makes one sausage, about 170 x 30. I worked out that it costs
no more than a dollar for the vital wheat gluten. Even if you
add another dollar for the rest of the ingredients, this is a very
cheap chorizo. It tastes just like the real thing and the
texture is very similar. You can use dried flaked garlic
instead of fresh and I reckon 1/2 tsp = 1 clove of garlic. This
is very hit and miss, however, because the flakes are big and the
spoon is small! I smash them up a little bit and the finished
appearance is just fine. Granules would do, but the chunks of real or flaked garlic look a
little bit like the fat that you usually find in chorizo, so add to its
verisimilitude. (See notes.)
I can’t recommend this recipe too much, if you like chorizo: it’s dirt cheap, it’s quick, it’s easy and it tastes amazing. It’s also great to have as a tapa when you have friends on board – vegetarian or otherwise.
When you mix this, try to use up every bit of the dough in the sausage so that you leave a really clean bowl. Make sure your tools are clean, too. Gluten and glue have the same root, etymologically, and any dough can be a nightmare to clean up, because it sticks to your cloths and scrubbers. However, using up all the dough eliminates this issue: soaking will get any remaining dough off the bowl, should you miss some.
English sausage
These ‛English’ sausages are great on
their own, in a bun/sandwich or as part of an ‛English’
breakfast. The seasoning is based on that used in Cumberland
sausage and the couscous is to replace the rusk that is always used
in British bangers, to keep the juices in the sausage so that they
don’t dry out. In this way they're quite different from
Bratwurst or other 100% meat sausages. In the days when I
occasionally ate meat, I always found these tricky to cook because of
the tendency of the ‛100% meat’ sausage to dry out, especially if
they were also low fat. Of course, the result isn’t as juicy as
a good quality meat banger, but I do feel that the addition of
couscous keeps it a little more moist. If you don’t want to use
couscous, go for the chorizo sausage recipe instead (link above) instead, and substitute the sausage
seasoning for that included in the chorizo recipe.
Instead
of the herbs, spices and salt in the recipe, shown in italics, I
recommend using 3 tsp Annie's English sausage seasoning,
for
a more complex flavour (see recipe at the bottom of the post.) There's a
generous amount of seasoning, because the seitan otherwise has
no flavour. It does in fact, have a slight, indescribable taste, which
can be
a bit intrusive, and this is why the ingredients include vinegar.
Most of the recipes that I’ve seen always insist on ‘apple cider’
vinegar (what other sort of cider is there? Surely the definition of
cider is fermented apple juice?), but any vinegar, apart from
Balsamic, would work just fine. So no doubt would lemon juice, but
vinegar is cheaper.
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