'Chicken' seitan and spinach in Indian creamy sauce - Malai palak

This is one of those insanely good Indian recipes that I find irresistable.  Malai means cream, Palak is spinach and this is a loosely adapted recipe from Vegan Richa. In her recipe, she uses soy curls to replace chicken, which are then cooked in a delectable creamy spicy sauce. I’m not even sure if you can buy soy curls in New Zealand and can’t imagine them being commonly available around the world, so it strikes me as a much better idea to use seitan.  Seitan also produces a nice 'meaty' result.

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.

Serves 2

Ingredients

For the ‟marinaded chicken”

6 slightly rounded tbsp vital wheat gluten

2 tbsp gram flour

2 tsp nutritional yeast

1/2 tsp mushroom stock powder

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp onion powder

        1/4 tsp garlic granules

1/2 tsp ground coriander

1/2 tsp ground cumin

1/4 cup water

1 tbsp soya sauce

For the sauce:

1 tsp oil

1 (Indian) bay leaf

1 whole clove

1 medium onion, chopped

1/2 tsp garlic paste

1/2 tsp ginger paste

1 small green chilli, diced

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp ground coriander

1/2 tsp ground cumin

1/8 tsp cayenne OR 1/4 tsp Kashmiri chilli powder

pinch ground cinnamon

1/8 tsp black pepper

*200 ml/7 oz ounce can of full fat coconut milk

2 tbsp vegan yoghurt

1/4 cup water or milk

125 g/4 oz spinach, washed and roughly chopped

1 tsp dried fenugreek leaves, kasuri methi

garam masala

chilli flakes

Method:

• Seitan: In a bowl, mix vital wheat gluten, gram flour, nutritional yeast, mushroom stock powder, salt, onion powder, garlic granules, ground coriander and ground cumin.
• In a small jug, mix the water and soya sauce and add them to the bowl.
• Mix into a soft dough, starting with a knife or spatula and ending with your hand. If the mix seems a little bit dry, add a little more water, a teaspoonful at a time. Use the dough to clean your bowl thoroughly, otherwise the dried seitan will need to be soaked off.
• Put the dough on a board and flatten down. You will be cutting it into bite-sized chunks, so it wants to be a suitable thickness.
• Put the trivet into your pressure cooker, along with 1/2 cup water. Place the seitan on the trivet, and bring up to pressure for 5 minutes. Let the pressure go down naturally.
• When you can take the lid off, take out the seitan and cut it up – or tear it for a more ‛authentic’ appearance.
• If you want to, you can now fry the chunks in some oil so that they are crisp on the outside. On odds, I think I prefer them soft.

For the sauce:

• Heat a pan over medium high heat and add some oil.
• Now add the bay leaf, clove, onion, garlic paste, ginger paste, green chilli salt. Cook stirring occasionally until onion is golden.
• Turn down the heat and add coriander, ground cumin, cayenne or Kashmiri chilli, cinnamon and black pepper
• Throw in the seitan pieces and turn for a few minutes so that they are well mixed in and covered in the spices.
• Then add in the milk, yoghurt, water and spinach and mix in. Reduce heat to medium low, cover and cook for 12-15 mins, checking that it’s not drying out. Add some more water, if necessary.
• Add the kasuri methi, check salt and flavour and carry on cooking until you get a rich creamy sauce.

Garnish with garam masala and chilli pepper flakes if you like, and serve with rice, roti or even good quality bread.

Variations:

• Use two or three leaves of Swiss chard instead of spinach.
• Replace the seitan with half a cup of chickpeas or beans, cooked and drained, putting them in with the spinach
• Add some quartered mushrooms, with the onions, etc.
• If you don’t have yoghurt, use more milk/water. If you have a lot of coconut yoghurt, you can just thin that down to suit. You need around 300 ml liquid. You may need to simmer for more or less time to achieve the consistency you want.

Notes:

• * Coconut milk tends to come in an odd assortment of sizes. Just use a can closest to the size in the recipe. If you’re fortunate to find dried, genuine coconut milk, mix that according to the instructions on the container.

 

You will find many more recipeslike this, here, here and here 

 

 

Seitan 'English' sausages

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.  They are quite different from my recipe for chorizo, but, if you are new to seitan, a particularly good one to start with, seeing as how most people like sausages.

 

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.

Makes 6 sausages, 2 servings

Ingredients

1/3 cup couscous

1/2 tsp yeast extract or miso

2/3 cup boiling water

 

3/4 tsp crushed black pepper

1/2 tsp thyme

3/4 tsp sage

1/8 - 1/4 tsp cayenne

1/4 tsp freshly ground nutmeg

1 1/2 tsp onion powder

1/2 tsp salt

 

OR 3 tsp Annie's English sausage seasoning  (see below)

 

1/4 cup (60 ml) water

1 tbsp soya sauce

1 tsp vinegar

1 heaped tsp tahini

1 tbsp olive oil or deodorised coconut oil, melted

2 tbsp chickpea flour

1/3 cup vital wheat gluten

• Cut baking parchment into 6 sheets, approximately 200/8" x 150/6".
• Put the couscous in a large bowl.
• Mix the yeast extract/miso in 2/3 cup boiling water and then pour it over the couscous. Cover the bowl and leave it for about ten minutes until the water has been absorbed.   
• Now mix the seasoning into the couscous.
• Add the 1/4 cup of water and mix well.
• Then add the soya sauce, followed by the vinegar, tahini and oil. Mix this all very thoroughly, because once you have added the vital wheat gluten it will be difficult to incorporate the other ingredients evenly.
• Now add the chickpea flour and the vital wheat gluten and quickly mix it in to the rest of the ingredients.  Again do this very thoroughly.   I find a butter knife the best tool.
• Mix as well as you can with your knife and then use your hand, incorporating all the flour that will be trying to stick to the edge of the bowl.  Keep mixing until everything until you have a smooth dough and it stops sticking to your hands. You should end up with a fairly soft mix.
• Place the dough on a board.  (Make sure you clean the bowl really thoroughly, because the gluten sticks as soon as it dries out, making it quite difficult to clean.  Soak it for a while if you've left much behind, before cleaniing.)  Roughly shape it into a rectangle about as long as you want your sausages to be.  (The dough is nowhere near as accommodating as bread dough when it comes to shaping).   
• Cut the dough in half and then thirds so that you have six equal lumps of dough. I usually have to pinch a bit of dough from one or two to get them all more or less the same size.
• Shape the sausages to be best of your ability – the wrapping finishes the job.  Don’t worry about gaps and creases.  The cooking sorts out most of that.  It would be fun to try to make one long sausage, wrap it up in baking paper and then form it into a coil to put onto the trivet.  This would produce and authentic Cumberland sausage shape, which would be fun and impressive, but I’m not sure how well it would work.
• Now put each sausage, centred at the edge of a piece of baking paper and roll it up tightly. This helps make it round.  Twist the paper at either end, until it is squashed against the end of the sausage.  Do this with all six sausages.
   
  
  
   
• Put the trivet into your pressure cooker.  Add about half a cup of water – don’t let it cover the trivet.  Place the sausages onto the trivet – it doesn’t matter if they are stacked – and bring up to pressure; cook for 5 minutes.
• Let the pressure come down naturally.

When they’re cooked, take the sausages out of the pressure cooker and unwrap them.    Put them somewhere where they can cool and dry out a little before storing them.  I find they keep best in my wooden bread bin!  Fry them before using them – the added olive oil gives additional flavour and I enjoy cooking them until they are slightly crisp.

 

 

Serve with mashed or smashed potatoes and vegetables, or any way that you enjoy your sausages.  They will stand up happily to barbecuing or cooking on the beach.

 

Note:

• you can use fine bulgar wheat instead of couscous if you prefer.  Or even soft breadcrumbs if you don't mind making your lovingly baked bread into breadcrumbs! 

Annie’s English Sausage seasoning:

Makes enough for about 60 sausages, or 20 servings

Ingredients

1 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

1 tsp ground mace

2 1/2 tbsp salt

2 tbsp black pepper

2 tbsp rubbed sage

2 tsp onion powder

1 1/4 tsp ground ginger

2 1/4 tsp thyme

3/4 tsp cayenne

1 1/2 tsp ground coriander

• If you don’t have ground nutmeg or mace (which don’t keep well ready-ground) grind up about 1/2 a nutmeg in a mortar or blender. Remove 1 1/2 tsp and add to a bowl.
• Take several blades of mace, grind to a powder, remove 1 tsp and add to the nutmeg.
• Now add all the rest of the ingredients and mix thoroughly. Put into a glass jar and keep as cool and dark as feasible.

Add 3 tsp of sausage seasoning to 1/3 cup vital wheat gluten, ie, per 6 sausages.