Making seitan

My first batch of seitan has been made!!

I bought Bob's Red Mill's vital wheat gluten, so as my first attempt at making seitan I decided to just follow the recipe on the side of the bag.  Here's Bob's Red Mill seitan recipe.

And so I started with the star of the show: vital wheat gluten.

I used my stand mixer with the dough hook, and to the gluten in the mixing bowl were added the flavorings:

 

Since I didn't have any onion powder I reconstituted the same amount of dehydrated onions and added those. After the marjoram, sage, and garlic powder, in went the water.  

I did find one issue with the water amount. The recipe calls for 2 cups of water and says that the dough shouldn't be excessively wet. Well, after 1 2/3 cups of water, already there was a little standing water in the bowl after kneading for a while, first with the dough hook and then by hand. So 1/3 cup of the called-for 2 cups of water didn't get used.  Good thing I didn't just dump it all in at once. It would have come out "excessively wet".

After the kneading felt complete, this is what it looked like: 

That's a Dachshund underneath the seitan dough...

I basically chopped it up into random strips not knowing what to expect after cooking, other than "it's going to grow". 

Well, immediately after putting it in the recommended soy sauce/molasses broth (which for some reason smelled beer-like to me - and that's not a bad thing!) it looked like this:

 

And after the suggested 1-hr simmering period, BOOM!

The magically poofing mock meat!!

And so here it is, my first batch of seitan:

 

Kind of looks like chunks of meat after all, doesn't it?

Chunks!

Tender, spongy, and ready to soak up whatever sauce or flavors you add to it. It really reminds me of deep-fried tofu. It has that same spongy, tender texture. The flavoring wasn't bad at all. Not so overpowering that it would take over after cooking in some other flavors, but not totally bland. I can see how one could easily tailor the flavor profile - make an Italiany basil-oregano-garlic seitan with tomato paste added, or a more Asian twist with ginger, toasted sesame seeds and green tea leaves. Plus the cooking liquid could be straight vegetable broth and new flavors could be added to this instead for additional notes to be incorporated. And who can forget the wine! Lots of flavor possibilities here. 

This was a nice first-time try to make it with some flavor, but not locking it into one whole flavor profile or style of cooking.  I'm thinking a little liquid smoke and tomato paste might enhance things a bit, though.

I did find that it was kind of watery, so I squeezed all the excess broth out of the chunks by just squeezing them in my hands. I saved the broth as I think it'd be great to use in cooking brown rice, quinoa, orzo, for boiling pasta, or to reuse in making the next batch. 

Ready with my seitan. :-)