The Quest for the Perfect Seitan

On Thanksgiving Day 2009, my family and I finished our Thanksgiving dinner. After finishing my turkey, I decided to become a vegetarian. We sent the leftover turkey home with a relative. I haven't eaten meat since.

I discovered life as a vegetarian isn't as simple as I thought. I always thought it was as simple as just leaving off the meat and eating everything else. Not so. While the need for quality protein isn't as great as some think, a good meat substitute would provide extra protein and also provide some dental exercise.

I found textured soy protein in granules and chunks. Done right, it's a pretty good meat imitation, both in taste and mouth feel. But there's the matter of phytoestrogens in soy, something to consider when eating a lot of it.

Seitan is a meatlike product made from vital gluten flour, a wheat flour processed to remove starch, leaving it better than half protein. Fortunately I don't have any problem with gluten intolerance or sensitivity. For those with that problem, stop reading here and find a soy blog.

For the past year, I've been looking for the perfect seitan recipe. Here are my ideal qualifications. The Seitan should:

• have the flavor of beef, pork, lamb or chicken.
• have the mouth feel and texture of meat.
• shred like meat. Think of how chicken breast shreds when you pull it apart with a fork.
• be relatively low in sodium.
• be relatively inexpensive. 
• taste reasonably good without having to bread and fry it.
  

Storebought seitan may taste good but it's usually both high in salt and pretty expensive per pound. So I set out to make the world's best seitan. I have used recipes apps and search engines to find seitan recipes. I've bought vegetarian cookbooks including one devoted to seitan.  

I've prepared it by simmering, boiling, steaming, baking and crockpotting. I've gotten reasonably good tasting seitan and a pretty decent texture, but sadly, never both in a single batch.


Texture is critical. Seitan can be rubbery to the point it doesn't shred but just cracks when pulled apart with forks. At its worst, your teeth sort of squeak as you bite through it. That's unacceptable.


At the other end of the spectrum, it can be soft and crumbly. I've made seitan with an uncanny resemblance to a matzoh ball. No meaty gratification with that batch.


One recipe says to knead the gluten a lot to develop a shredding texture. Another says just mix and don't knead or you'll get rubbery seitan. Yet another recipe claims that adding garbanzo bean flour or soy is the key.  One says boil, another says simmer.  Add ginger. Don't add ginger. The recommendations are endless.

Seitan prepared teriyaki-style with rice and green beans. I got the look of meat but not quite the taste of beef. But your eyes do say "meat" with this one. Marinating in mirin before pan-grilling in a little canola oil developed the beefy "char" appearance.

These pages will tell the story of my quest for the perfect seitan.