HAIL SEITAN! The Weird World of Homemade Wheat-Meat

Foodies (and other top-hatted, monocled, highbrow goons and goofusses), don’t like processed food, distrust “food products,” and look down on Taco Bell consumers (“I say! Look at those mindless sheeple at the local purveyor of Industrialized American-Mexican fare!”).  I kind of like food and want to make choices that indicate my mindfulness of the effects of my consumption and my love for the planet (I love it but I’m not… in love with it), so I continue my journey to find simple, delicious substitutes for meat. The implication of the term “substitute” is that it can’t stand by itself or is in some ways a lesser option, but the reason I use this terminology is because a plate should have a protein, and the protein of choice in a traditional Western diet is meat. So I seek another way.

My hope is to help encourage a “non-soy-based, non-heavily-processed, local-focused veg diet, [which] is the definition of low impact.”

So when I’m at the grocery store and I see something labeled “wheat-meat” and is supposedly both “mock duck” and “mock pork” simultaneously, I was immediately intrigued (like characters in Dracula, both entranced/repelled).  I imagine that this is some kind of vegetarian frankenproduct, but it turns out that’s really not the case if you make it yourself.

A Kirk Cameron’s depiction of the animal seitan comes from

Though it appears to be a highly processed mock-food, seitan (pronounced SAY-TAN), actually only contains two ingredients:  vital gluten flour and water.  Seitan is basically high-gluten boiled bread; it’s obviously not gluten-free.  If you don’t feel like spending time locating vital gluten flour (which you can pick up at any health food store and at some supermarket organic sections) or if you don’t want to make this recipe for whatever reason, you can find commercial seitan in Asian/international markets or in health food stores (but the mark-up on seitan is incredibly high:  12 oz of seitan will run you about $4.00 (and that was at Kroger)–however, making it only costs about a buck a pound).

Canned from an international store is the cheaper albeit more dubious option

But don’t waste your money!  Don’t eat something out of a can you can’t read! Make seitan yourself! I’ve been improving this recipe for awhile and have worked out the kinks.  You won’t have to sell your soul for this meat substitute (har, har, har).

Invite SEITAN into your household in SIX simple steps!

You Aren’t What You Eat: Vegetable Stock

Vegetable stock has so many uses and can elevate just about anything it’s added to; it’s become essential to my kitchen setup.  It’s also really cheap to make a ton of it, so I find myself making it quite often.  I used to prepare it according to the free recipe online that has “5 Stars” (if you trust the pedestrian masses and their derivative “star system”, go ahead and use that recipe (but it’s a blunder, I say!)).  That recipe was fine until I started shopping around and trying other recipes.

I’ve adapted Mark Bittman’s recipe from his great book How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.  This is the best vegetable stock I’ve tried.  Once prepared, you can use this surprisingly hearty stock to build a soup (I’ve made everything from vegetarian chili to tortilla soup with this stock), sauce, to fortify grains like quinoa (use stock in place of water), or you can just sip it on a hot summer day (if you’re into that).

I like to make about two quarts (1/2 gallon) at any given time—you can cut this recipe in half or double it depending on how much you want to make, but bear in mind that it only takes a few more minutes of prep to double or triple this recipe.  (Storage information follows):