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Credit: Jeanette Watson
Seitan, amusingly pronounced Satan, is made from wheat flour. The seotan fundamentalists Wash The Flour, 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. Considering that my boat is a white flour free zone, and the amount of time and work required, to produce gluten in the way, I rather feel that the abbreviaton is accurate! Anyway, this method is not boat appropriate, because it requires vast
amounts of water. Far easier, and as far as I can make out, just as effective is simply to buy the gluten from your local nutters' shop or online. Probably you can even buy it in supermarkets in some places. 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.
To use it, mix fairly small amounts of 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; as gluten is from the same root as glue, etymologically, they do have a point. However, maybe it's the proliferation of the dishwasher, but for some reason nobody ever seems to suggest soaking the tools and bowls in cold water. This solves the problem. Even better, use up all the dough you've made by carefully scraping out bowls and scraping off mixing tools. 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.
Seitan is a really good additional string to the veg~an's bow, assuming you aren't gluten intolerant! I have to confess that, try as I might, I can't get enthusiastic about either tofu or tempeh. If the recipe realy needs tofu, I make some from chickpea flour (Burmese tofu) (which I'll post in due course), but in most cases, seitan is a fine substitute for either. Moreover, it 's completely unnecessary to fool around with (ineffective) marinades: you can add the herbs and/or spices to the dough when you mix it. It's also cheap and easy to store. The charming thing about seitan is that it has a completely different texture from most other veg~an food. While I can't say I've every really missed the texture of meat, 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. It 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 attribute makes it a really useful choice when you are entertaining or feeding people who are sceptical about veg~an food. If you don't tell them, I would wonder how many people would even suspect that the 'meat' in their curry is something quite different. In due course, I'll post a few basic seitan recipes, that are suited to people on small boats, who don't want to spend a lot of time preparing it. Apparently when you make it from scratch, you can produce a stringy seitan that really approximates the texture of chicken. Why bother? Let's just take it on its own values as in interesting extra choice in our diets.
I
have been working on this recipe for a while, now, determined to get it
right. I think most people enjoy sausages, with mash, or chips or as
part of a huge fried breakfast. What I love about this recipe is that
is definitely a voyaging one, which means that you can have sausages
half way across the ocean, should you so choose. Not something many
people can boast of, unless they have a freezer. In true voyaging style,
the ones in the photo above are served with 'Surprise' peas. Judging
by the rest of the stuff on the table, the sea is pretty smooth! These
sausages are also quite fast to make, especially if you already have
some sausage seasoning mixed: once you've cooked the sausages in the
pressure cooker, they only need a few minutes in the frying pan to brown
them to your taste. Apart from my recipe for chorizo, this will be my first post about seitan, and I think it's a particularly good one to start with.
I
am besotted with seitan recipes: the texture is so different from
most other vegetarian and vegan foods, it’s cheap and making ‛meat’
with it is so quick. 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 page.) 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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