This recipe is extracted from The Vegan Butcher cookbook where it lives amongst the ultimate guide to making and using seitan at home - alongside every other plant based meat substitute you can dream up!
What is this seitan thing?
Seitan is a versatile mock meat-like product that has been made for thousands of years and remains a popular way to make meat substitutes in supermarket products and home recipes to this day. Gluten is the name of the protein that is found in wheat, which means it’s a plant based form of protein that benefits from the flexibility as an ingredient in the same way flour with gluten can make soft, stretchy, chewy and hard textures depending on how it’s used. Using this extracted gluten protein to make mock meat can happen in two ways.
The first is the most popular as it uses a dried powder form of the gluten protein (called gluten flour, vital wheat gluten or VWG for those down with the slang). This makes it super easy to mix flavours in to both the dry ingredients and liquid of the seitan, which is mixed into a dough of protein much like you’d mix together bread.
What’s the flour washing method for making seitan?
The traditional method is done by washing flour (not a typo!). You make a dough ball of flour and water, knead to get the gluten protein activated, then wash the ball of dough under water until only the gluten network remains. This method is one of the cheapest and highest protein plant based proteins available. Even if you don’t intend on being a regular washed seitan producer, following this method at least once gives you both a better understanding of how dough and bread works (making you a more effective baker!) but also lets you see and touch what gluten protein actually is. Information is power! Lucky for you, it’s that exact method this recipe will be using today.
The con with this method as because the gluten is formed ahead of time, it’s much harder to incorporate flavour to the tightly bound gluten. That’s why seitan recipes using this method call for more flavour than you might be used to, especially by using flavoursome simmering broths so that the final product doesn’t taste like pure gluten (not so delicious). To the rescue is this glaze sauce! It’s moreishly delicious, and rich enough to cover up any voids of flavour you might’ve missed.
Can I use any flour for this?
Any dough with around 50–70% hydration is appropriate to wash with. The higher the protein content of your flour, the more end-product you’ll make. Bread flour has the highest protein so will leave slightly more gluten protein. Remember we’re washing away most of the flour to expose the protein, so really the cheapest flour you can find is usually the best one. Just don’t use cake flour, as the low protein content invites more work for less return when doing this method.
Please note that hand-washed seitan, and most flour-based recipes, can require more or less water in the dough or time to wash depending on temperature, sea level, or protein content in your chosen flour. Pay close attention to the photos to replicate similar results.
Why do you add food colouring?
If making beef- or pork-inspired seitan, add food colouring (pink or red) to water. It’ll stain the gluten and keep the colour even after you wash the dough ball. This is also a good idea for your first-time hand washing, as it will help you see the difference between the starch (light clumps) and gluten protein in your dough as you wash.It also means as you cut the mock meat open, it’ll give the effect that animal based effects give and help complete the realistic effect.
