A Vegan Called Bacon

Quinoa reincarnation smugness

2009-06-16T18:32:14Z

I felt quite smug the other day. I made two fairly fancy meals in a single sprint of effort.

Lunch was quinoa (with some herbs stirred in); roasted vegetables; puy lentils in a ground coriander & balsamic dressing; and a “yoghurt” of blended soft tofu, umeboshi paste and salt:

Dinner was the ingredients for lunch, mixed and layered with lasagne, baked with the yoghurt on top:

Gosh, was I pleased with myself. I love lazy food fiddles. It’s a trick akin to bin soup, only less soupy.

On a separate note, if anyone can show me a picture of vegan lasagne that actually looks appetising, I will write them a bad poem about their lasagne as a prize.

Totally Inauthentic Dan Dan Noodles

2009-05-08T13:55:41Z

Just a quick post to share my latest obsession: a 10 minute, super-spicy lunchtime noodle dish, loosely based on Dan Dan Noodles. I love spicy food, but the exciting insight (for me, at least) is the idea of putting sesame paste in noodles.

The sauce uses sichuan peppers, dried red chillis, tahini (sesame paste), and chilli oil. The type of chilli oil is a crucial detail. It should be dark red, with a thick layer of sediment:

It’s totally inauthentic because (a) I use green vegetables instead of meat; and (b) there appears to be some debate on the authenticity of sesame paste. I took my inspiration from a recipe in Fushcia Dunlop’s wonderfully readable and fascinating gastro/travel book Shark’s Fin Soup and Sichuan Pepper, so I’m assuming it’s a least slightly authentic.

If you don’t like a punchy heat accompanied by a numbing sensation in your mouth, cut out the sichuan pepper and use one tablespoon of chilli oil - it’s still tasty.

Inauthentic Vegan Dan Dan Noodles

Ingredients

1tsp whole sichuan peppers
4 dried red chillis, snipped in half, seeds discarded
A handful of green veg, chopped small (I’ve used spring greens, french beans, cabbage..)
A packet of instant noodles, flavouring discarded
3 tbsp light soy sauce
2 tbsp chilli oil (with plenty of sediment)
1 tbsp tahini (sesame paste)

Method

Get the noodles boiling.

Heat 1tbsp oil in a wok on a medium-hot flame. Throw in the sichuan peppers and let them sizzle. Add the chillis, stir around briefly, then add the greens. Stir fry for a minute or so.

Mix soy, chilli oil and tahini in a bowl. Add some ground sichuan pepper if you like.

Drain the noodles. Throw them in the wok with the greens. Stir through the sauce. Pour it all into your bowl. Consume, and sweat.

Wild Garlic Risotto at Cocky Height

2009-04-23T15:57:45Z

I’m pleased that spring has started to gush green things at me, because it gives me a chance to do more foraging. In the field, I’m using Richard Mabey’s classic book Food for Free, which I now own in handy pocket format.

hawthorn

My foraging season started a couple of weeks ago with a hunt for Saint George’s Mushrooms, but it was too early, and the weather had been too dry. All I got was a handful of hawthorn leaves, which, according to Mr Mabey, are commonly called “bread and cheese”, and are “the first wild vegetable a country child eats”. Apparently Food for Free was written in the twentieth century, but I suspect this was in an alternate dimension. For the record, “bread and cheese” tastes like grass-flavoured parsley.

We’ve also had some very nice nettle soup, which led me to wonder how people collected it before gloves were invented.

The prettiest and tastiest stuff so far are ramsons (wild garlic), which were in full flower last week down by the river. It makes for a wonderful, radioactive green soup, and the flowers are a pretty addition. However, making fritters with the flowers, as suggested on one website, seemed like a fairly pointless idea to me.

Kim is not quite as eager as me to eat wild food, mainly due to potential unwanted urine-related garnish. When picking blackberries as a child, my mum always used to advise us to “stay away from cocky height”, but unfortunately this sage wisdom is hard to follow with low, ground-covering perennials like ramsons.

Canine excreta hopefully washed away, I also made a kind of ramson pesto, which (if I don’t eat it all) should keep for a few months. I have been spreading it liberally on pizzas and toast. A mission to augment it with edible flowers led to my favourite wild garlic dish of the season:

It’s a basic risotto, with a generous amount of ramson paste stirred in. I garnished it with dandelion “hearts”, some foraged chives, and a daisy - which is described in the literature as bitter, but I found to be quite delicate and fragrant.

Dandelion hearts are the unopened young flower buds, which have a slightly bitter but complex flavour. They also sport an unattractive small-black-blob appearance that raised Kim’s suspicion levels rather high. I’ll be eating them again, but I don’t think she will.

This Post Is Gross But Contains Some Seriously Useful Sausage Information

2009-04-11T18:58:09Z

Phew - chapter one of the great seitan adventure is more-or-less complete. I wasn’t expecting it to be this difficult. There’s so many possible variations. I made thirty-four different varieties of sausage. I ended up chewing and then spitting samples out like a wine buff, because even a gluten glutton like me couldn’t contemplate that much rubbery dough sat in my stomach.

I decided to focus on sausages for this part of the adventure. I concentrated on the steaming-in-foil method, because it’s quick and easy, thus allowing for more variations in the same amout of time.

The starting point was Vegan Dad’s sausage recipe. It came out as the most hilariously gross thing I have ever had the pleasure to cook:

I was so pleased that I posted the image to a thread “what’s your grossest food porn pic?” at the PPK forums. My favourite response was:

“you win, dude. YOU. WIN.”

So anyway, in the following weeks, I steamed my way through a bewildering and message catalogue of sausage options. I tried them mixed with mushrooms, apples, potato. I steamed them for 10 minutes, 30 minutes and 40 minutes. I wrapped them tight and I wrapped them loose. I made them moist and sticky, and firm and powdery. I ate them immediately and I left them overnight.

Here’s what I found:

You don’t need to steam them very long. 20 minutes is enough. 40 minutes and it starts getting unpleasantly firm.
Kneading doesn’t make any difference. In fact, the longer I kneaded them, the more rubbery they got. This may not be true for other cooking methods, of course.
You need to add something mushy, moist, but with structure. This will keep the texture open and stop it drying out. Mashed beans, grated apple, and finely chopped mushrooms all worked fairly well. Mashed potato and mashed tofu worked to a limited degree but still resulted in a fairly dry sausage
Onion makes the best general moistening agent. It not only preserves moisture in the sausage, but also improves flavour (presumably through the introduction of sugars, resulting in a Maillard Reaction)
Gram flour reduces rubberyness and increases flouryness. 100% gluten flour is unpleasantly rubbery. A high-protein flour decreases the rubberyness while maintaining good binding properties. I used gram flour (aka besan or garbanzo flour) because I do a lot of Indian cookery anyway. About 30% gram flour gave the best balance. 50% gram flour was pronounced by an ominvore tester as “chickeny”. One for future exploration.
Pretty much all other texture-related additives give diminishing returns. I tried adding agar, tapioca, oil, rusk, breadcrumbs - they all made a difference, but a tiny one, and hardly worth it. Oil was the interesting one. I read somewhere that meat sausages are an emulsion of fat and meat. I thought if I could get a fat emulsion in to the sausages, it might come out nicely. If anything, the mouth feel of the oil sausage was worse.
Savoury flavours disappear when you fry a sausage. I found it hard to put in too many herbs. On the other hand, tomato paste and liquid smoke become overpowering - presumably because other balancing flavours have vanished
They taste better when you leave them overnight. I guess it’s that Maillard Reaction again.

In some ways, I’m disappointed with my findings. I was half-hoping to revolutionise the world of gluten sausages by discovering some new and exciting formula. In fact, I’ve just found out that most of the existing recipes have it more or less right already. I suppose the most interesting finding is that you can get away with simplifying it a lot.

Simple English Breakfast Sausages

Ingredients

2 cups gluten flour
1 cup gram flour
1 cup grated onion
about 2 cups of water (depends on your onion and your flour)
2 tsp salt
a big handful of chopped, fresh sage (maybe a bit of parsley and/or thyme, too)
plenty of pepper
2 tsp ground nutmeg

Method

Mix the flours together. Mix in the onion, salt, sage, pepper and nutmeg. Add enough water to make a fairly moist ball of dough (you need less than you might think). Briefly knead.

Form into sausages (about 10 or so) and roll gently in foil. Twist the ends.

Throw in a steamer (or boil - it doesn’t make much difference) for 20 minutes.

Wait as long as you can (they taste best the next day) and fry gently for 10 minutes (the gram flour causes the “skin” to go quite chewy if you fry them too hard). I like them in the English classic bangers-n-mash style: with mashed potato and mushroom gravy. And plenty of mustard.

They freeze well, too.

And, have you ever seen such a splendid sausage montage? (originals here).

Victorian/1970s Time Travel with Ragout and Balls

2009-04-11T18:57:42Z

I like the Victorians. I like moustaches and pommade; malacca canes and locks of hair in brooches; candlesticks and napkin rings; claret decanters and fish knives.

my great-great-grandfather, plus crazy beard policy

There was an explosion of Victorian vegetarianism at end of the nineteenth century. By 1910, London was awash with veggie restaurants, and could boast what was claimed to be “the largest vegetarian restaurant in the world”, equipped with “modem three-tier steamers capable of steaming … 350 cup puddings at one time”, and two ladies’ dining rooms where “as many as 250 business girls avail themselves of the advantage of a vegetarian meal nearly every day”.

The Order of the Golden Age, a leading voice of vegetarianism during this period, was delighted in 1911 to be able to reprint an article from the Meat Trades Journal stating “vegetarianism is spreading across the country like some loathsome disease.”

I recently came across the Golden Age Cook Book, published in 1898, and packed with Victorian recipes such as “A Border Timbale Of Mock Chicken” and “Cucumber Jelly” (weirdly containing half a pound of gelatine). An irresistible opportunity to do culinary time travel.

I picked two dishes that sounded complementary, a “Ragout of Egg Plant” and “Mock Fish Chops”, and decided to follow them as closely as I could. This meant making myself do strange things like boiling an egg plant whole, and serving it with a gravy made of pickled gherkins.

The result resembled a parody of a 1970s vegetarian meal, worthy and unappetising (especially in the dismal lighting of my kitchen at night). But, to my surprise, it was impeccably toothsome.

What’s more, I tested the “fish chops” with my omni-foodie-friends, and they were generally pronounced to be delicious. My French friend was even reminded of his mum’s fish balls from when he was a kid, which sounds like praise indeed. (Incidentally, they don’t taste of fish.)

Here’s how I made it.

Fish Chops

Ingredients

3 medium potatoes, peeled and finely diced
1 large carrot, peeled and finely diced
1 cup “milk”
2T “butter”
1tsp green peppers, finely chopped
1tsp fresh parsley, finely chopped
1tsp grated onion
1 pinch ground nutmeg
1 pinch cayenne pepper
1 tomato, watery seedy stuff removed, finely chopped
2T sweet sherry
3T breadcrumbs
2T gram flour (chickpea/garbanzo flour) or egg replacer

Method

Boil the potato in the milk for about 6 or 7 minutes, until fairly soft but still not at all mushy. In a separate pan (I have no idea why), boil the carrots in as little water as possible, until the same texture as the potatoes.

Add the drained carrots to the potatoes, along with the butter, onion, spices, herbs, green pepper, tomatoes, and sherry. Stir it all together and season to taste.

Thicken it with the breadcrumbs and gram flour (you may not need a whole 2T of gram flour; add it gradually).

Form into lots of little cutlets (I made balls), coat in more breadcrumbs (I didn’t bother), and deep-fry until a deep brown.

Ragout of Egg Plant

Ingredients

Ragout

1 egg plant (aubergine)
2T “butter”
4 mushrooms, sliced
1T fresh, chopped parsley
1/2 small onion, finely chopped
3T breadcrumbs
1T vegan parmesan (could subsitute some nutritional yeast flakes, or just salt)
Seasoning

Gravy

1T “butter”
1T flour
1 slice of onion, chopped very finely
1 dried shiitake mushroom (optional)
1 pickled gherkin, chopped very finely
3 olives, chopped very finely
1 cup water
Seasoning

Method

Boil the egg plant in a pan of salted water for 10 minutes. When cooked, drain, cool in water, peel, and cut into slices about 3/4 inch think, and place in the bottom of a shallow casserole dish.

Fry the mushrooms and onion in the butter for about 3 minutes. Add parsley and seasoning and fry for 1 more minute.

Pour the mushroom mixture on top of the egg plant. Mix together breadcrumbs and “parmesan”, and sprinkle on top. Bake in a fairly hot oven for 20 minutes or until browned.

For the sauce, put the mushroom in a cup of boiling water and place on one side for 5 minutes. Melt the butter in a small saucepan and mix with flour and onion. Cook until slightly browned. Slowly add the mushroom water (or a very light veggie stock), stirring to avoid lumps. Add seasoning, gherkins and olives, and gently simmer for a few minutes until the sauce has the consistency of a light cream.

Garnish the lot with cucumbers, and consume, taking care of your whiskers on the gravy.

Deep Fried Cashew and Mustard Jelly? Or what?

2009-04-11T18:57:52Z

The other day, with my earnings from cooking at Dub and Grub, I bought myself a big new stack of cookery books.

One of my purchases was The Uncheese Cookbook. Like many vegans, I take obsessive delight in making obtuse veganisations of unlikely foods. Cheese, of course, is one of the most difficult; there’s really nothing that approximates to the flavour of cheese (nutritional yeast doesn’t do it for me). And as for making something with the right texture and stringy, gooey melting properties, forget it.

The cheese orgy, from my favourite Asterix book

But I like a challenge, and I fancied making something unusual for the Scottish Vegans potluck last weekend (which was great - check out the spread), so I tested a “brie”, a “swizz” cheese, a “gruyère” and a “boursin”. It seems that the Uncheese Cookbook staple method is to suspend a variety of “creamy” things in agar. Here they are:

And here’s the boursin on a home-made oat cake:

The results were mixed, as you might expect.

The boursin was very simple (firm tofu, mayo, garlic, herbs, black pepper), very delicious, and very creamy.

The brie was essentially tofu and agar. It had a light texture, quite wet, not unpleasant but still (unfortunately) with the distinctive floury mouth-feel of tofu. The flavour was pleasant, but a bit heavy on the nutritional flakes for my taste. It had a lot of lemon, which did taste really good.

The gruyère was something like hummus and agar, flavoured with dill seeds and umeboshi paste, set in agar agar. The texture was very close to a firm cheddar, but the mouth-feel was pretty different — mainly, I think, due to the absence of fat. I really didn’t like this one, because the dill dominated the flavours, like a dose of bad breath from someone eating stale Swedish bread.

The swizz cheese, however, was very popular wherever I took it (and it followed me around for a few days). Even the most suspicious omnivores ended up scoffing it. It was soft and moist, with a lovely mustardy tang. It had the least floury mouth-feel, probably because its base was simply a handful of whizzed-up cashews suspended in more agar agar.

It was such a success that I had to find out what happens when you cook it. Frying and grilling were more or less pointless, but deep frying it in breadcrumbs produced this oozy, piping hot, savoury chunk of greasy deliciousness, which tasted amazing with a bit of wasabi:

It was so nice, I’d like to serve it at Dub and Grub some day. The problem is, what would I call it? Most of the customers are omnivorous, and even longterm, strange-substitute-hardened vegans would, I suspect, think twice about “deep fried vegan cheese”. My idea was “deep fried mustard and cashew jelly”, but I think that would freak people out. Someone who tried the Swizz cheese said it had a texture like pâté; but fried pâté?

Deep Fried Breaded Cashew and Mustard Jelly Pâté Cheese Chunks

Cheese:
1½C / 350ml water
5T agar flakes
¼C/100g raw cashews
4T yeast flakes
3T fresh lemon juice
1T onion granules
2tsp Dijon mustard
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp garlic granules
½ tsp mustard powder

Breading and frying:
A few handfuls of Panko breadcrumbs
4T cornflour
Cold water to mix
Plenty of neutral oil suitable for deep frying (e.g. vegetable oil)

Put the agar flakes in a pan in cold water, bring to the boil, and simmer for 5 minutes, stirring often. Blend this up with all the remaining ingredients for as long as you can be bothered, to get a really smooth paste.

It starts setting as soon as it gets a bit cool, so pour it immediately into a suitable mold - a margarine tub, maybe, or a small tupperware container. Cover and chill, preferably overnight (the flavours and texture seem to improve).

When you’re ready, mix the cornflour and water in a small bowl, to a slightly thick liquid (something like single cream). Prepare your breadcrumbs in a thick pile on a plate next to the cornflour mixture. Get your oil hot and ready.

Cut 3/4/2cm thick slices of cheese. Dip each one in the cornflour mixure, then cover in breadcrumbs. Dip it back in the cornflour and then back in the breadcrumbs. Press this second layer of breadcrumbs firmly onto the cheese. (It helps if you do the dipping with your right hand, and keep your left hand clean for pressing and transferring to the pan).

Fry until a rich brown colour, maybe for a little bit longer than you think, to get that jelly properly melted.

Serve with wasabi or something else sharp to cut through the grease. Remember to let it cool again for a minute or you will burn your mouth.

Oatcakes as an Aid to Rampaging

2009-03-12T16:36:17Z

One of my half-baked cooking projects is to explore traditional Scottish dishes. Ingredients-wise, this means root vegetables, oats, and animal products. Lately, however, I’ve been thinking about the cooking methods.

It’s cold in the Highlands, and naturally people used to cook on an open fire which was constantly burning. One-pot dishes like soups and stews, which could easily be re-heated, were convenient and tasty. And baking was done on a completely flat, seasoned, iron plate, called a girdle (”griddle” in English). There’s a picture of a traditional girdle in this description of traditional Highland “blackhouses”.

The simplicity of this way of cooking appeals to me. According to the 14th century Chronicles of Sir John Froissart, a girdle and a bag of oats were standard issue army equipment:

Under the flaps of his saddle, each man carries a broad plate of metal; behind the saddle, a little bag of oatmeal: when they have eaten too much of the sodden flesh, and their stomach appears weak and empty, they place this plate over the fire, mix with water their oatmeal, and when the plate is heated, they put a little of the paste upon it, and make a thin cake, like a cracknel or biscuit, which they eat to warm their stomachs: In this manner the Scots entered England, destroying and burning every thing as they passed.

I don’t have anything nearly as interesting to say about these particular oatcakes, apart from they were very nice, and simple to make. I couldn’t be bothered to do them all in my tiny frying pan (I’m on the lookout for a proper girdle), so I did them in the oven. I suppose that if you cooked them on a girdle over an open fire, they would traditionally come out tasting of smoke. Unlike mine, The Stripey Cat’s oatcakes include smoked paprika as an ingredient, an interesting idea that I’ll try next time. Though if I’m really trying for authenticity, I should actually get a fire burning in the garden…

Scottish Oat Cakes

Ingredients
3C/250g oatmeal (basically, any rolled oats that aren’t too big)
a good pinch of salt
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1T melted margarine
hot water

Mix salt and baking soda into the oatmeal in a bowl. Pour in the melted fat and mix around. Add enough hot water to make a stiff paste, then briefly knead and roll out as thinly as possible.

Cut into triangles and bake on a floured tin in a moderately hot oven (400F/200C), until the ends curl up and the cakes are crips (about 20-25 minutes).

Cool somewhere suitable, and store in an airtight container. Serve plain with a fine single malt; or with salty, savoury or sweet things. Sodden flesh optional.

Boulettes de Gluten en Meurette Sont Super-Cool

2009-02-10T20:54:07Z

The crazed glutenfest binge continues. It’s making for some weird photographic material, which I always like. (I think it might take a while to finish the project. I’ve got through 3 kilos of gluten flour in two weeks.)

Yesterday’s chewy starch-frenzy took me to meatball territory and this pretty fine recipe from Felicity, which I made without the gram flour.

Today, inspired by The Stripey Cat, I thought I’d simultaneously finish the glutenous little nuggets off and give the credit crunch the bird, by using more or less a whole bottle of wine in a single dish. Gravy, French style.

Formidable, it was.

In addition to sliced up meatlessballs, I used two types of soy: a really firm smoked hazelnut tofu, and silken tofu, deep fried. I’m not sure I liked the lurid pink colour adopted by the unfried tofu. Next time I’ll fry the whole lot really hard, to get a more mellow shade of brown.

Other than that, I just followed the original Tofu en Meurette recipe.

I served it with an experimental take on Colcannon, which was not terribly attractive, but tasted lovely, and mopped up the juices. At least the Colcannon was seasonal and thus cheap, offsetting the tofu/wine extravaganza. (I reckon the meal turned out at £2.20 a portion).

Fancy, ugly Colcannon

Ingredients (makes about 4 portions)

2 medium potatoes
1/4 of a large turnip
1 parsnip
1/4 of a celeriac
1/4 of a large white cabbage
red wine
your favourite frying oil(s)

Method

Finely dice the root vegetables and put them on to boil in salted water for 10 minutes.

Melt a knob of “butter” in a large pan. Add shredded cabbage and a dash of red wine. Cover and cook over a medium heat, stirring a fair bit. I think it tastes nice just slightly burnt.

When the root vegetables are done, strain them, and then throw them into a hot wok and a tablespoon of olive oil. Stirfry until it starts getting a bit mushy, then stir in the cabbage. Season well with salt and lots of black pepper.

Fish Paranoia

2009-02-26T12:45:35Z

It was fish that turned me. When I was about eight years old, my mum served up fish that had eyes and a tail. For the first time, I realised that fish fingers were made out of the same things that eat and move and people own as pets. It sparked a series of nightmares involving swallowing living, wriggling goldfish. Luckily, I didn’t get nightmares about eating fingers.

(It took me a few more years to get my head round the linguistic tricks used to disguise other edible animals, and fully appreciate the link between pork and Pigs, beef and Cows, and so on. I must have been a very literal child).

Ever since my fishy nightmares, I’ve had Fish Paranoia. Especially in Thai restaurants, where my explanations of how I-don’t-eat-fish-sauce-and-it’s-really-important-and-please-write-it-down get met with a wholly unconvincing nod (”yeah, yeah, no fish, whatever”). Then I’ll spend an hour forlornly pushing things around my plate, tasting fish in everything I put in my mouth (including water). It’s strange that I don’t get meat-broth paranoia in the same way, considering I’ve probably ended up eating some every other time I eat in an omni restaurant.

But while we were in China and Japan last year, I learned to like the flavour of the sea. In Japan, the liberal amounts of seaweed are only matched by liberal amounts of fish broth, fish flakes, and fish innards, which really foments fish paranoia. But still, I persisted in eating seaweed. In China, we ate mock fish a few times, which was usually gluten faux meat wrapped in seaweed:

In an effort to conquer the paranoia, I recently decided to veganise Cullen Skink. I have a long-standing plan to veganise traditional Scottish foods. So doing a traditional Scottish fish soup lets start my Scottish project off, and chase away that fish paranoia, all in one go.

It turns out to be really easy. Veganised, it’s basically onions and potatoes boiled in soy milk, with some flavourings. It tastes of smoke, with a hint of the sea. I’m not sure it’s for everyone, but it’s definitely a bit different.

Ingredients

A carton of soy milk
Two sheets of nori seaweed (in the photo it’s wakame; not strong enough)
Liquid smoke
A big bay leaf
Some sprigs of parsley
An onion
A couple of potatos
A tomato

Method

Gently heat the soymilk, bay leaf, parsley stalks and seaweed in a pan. The seaweed disintegrates so it’s best to put it in an infuser or a bag of muslin. Add very finely chopped potatoes (we want them to disintegrate), and finely chopped onions.

Gently boil for as long as you can be bothered - at least 15 minutes, but a good 30 to get it nice and mushy.

Remove the parsley stalks, bay leaf, and seaweed. Add chopped parley heads and a generous amount of liquid smoke. Season liberally with salt and lots of pepper.

Just before serving, add finely chopped tomato, and serve with a wedge of lemon to be squeezed in before putting it in your mouth.

The tomato and the lemon are what really bring the flavours together, but they also make the soy curdle. The first time round, I added the tomato in the bowl, and it worked OK. For the photo session, I made the mistake of boiling the soup with the tomato, and it curdled. That made it look horrid, but it tasted good. That is, if you like that kind of thing, and you are OK with Fish Paranoia.

(The other lumps in the soup are seitan, but I wouldn’t bother if I were you. The first time I made it without seitan, and I preferred it).

Seitan Science

2009-01-23T16:21:28Z

Good gluten meat is great. In China they’ve been doing it for centuries (I’ve described elsewhere the variety we encountered there) . My theory is that to really push the art of faux meat forward in the West, we need to learn and translate their knowledge on the subject. Bryanna Clark Grogan’s Authentic Chinese Cuisine (one of my favourite cook books) does a pretty good job, but there’s still a long way to go before this kind of silly, fun nonsense is possible:

The strangest faux meat I've ever seen: mock pigeon

Meanwhile, it seems to me that most progress in the art of cooking with gluten that I read about is largely won at random. Steam it for 20 minutes or 40 minutes? Bake it for 60 or 120 minutes? At 300F or 375F? Why? I’m confused!

I’ve spent a while reviewing the most popular recipes online, and have compiled a list of possible variations based on these. It’s ambitious, but I want to find out what really makes a difference to the texture of that wonderful, wierd, chewy stuff we call seitan. And in the process, I’ve gathered about a million different styles and opinions about making it.

The questions I want to answer are:

How does cooking method change things? There’s steaming, usually (but not always) in foil; boiling, usually in broth, when it’s properly called ’seitan’; oven baking (wrapped), as in the famed veggeroni/seitan o’ greatness; oven baking (open), seemingly appropriate for bacon or ribz; and oven baking (crockpot/slow baste), which is rarely blogged about, because it’s not so convenient, but supposedly produces a light texture
How does cooking time change the texture or flavour? I’ve seen slow basting methods suggesting cooking times of anywhere between four hours and eight hours. Longer baking times have lower temperatures, so I am treating temperature as a dependent variable.
What about texture-related additives (as opposed to flavours such as spices, herbs, etc)? There are loads of variations in the wild, including onion, oil, mushed beans, crumbled tofu, gram flour, mashed pots, panko, and minute tapioca.
Does kneading make a difference? Some assert that it does; apparently, “when you’re done kneading, knead some more“; maybe because gluten which has been kneaded less tends to get puffy.
How about trying to make it textured by stretching or folding it?

Science time.