Seitan

I need to cleanse the pallet of the blog from politics. Yuck. Politics has a way of making people stupid, and despite the detached and analytical angle I usually use to observe partisan politics, I can't help but get really passionate, and subsequently rather angry, regarding issues of animal rights. I am cursed with a rather high degree of understanding of public opinion, and this leads me to understand what a huge uphill struggle the fight for animal rights will be. I'm no Marxist (not by a long shot!), but I can't help but agree with his observation about the idiocy of rural people. Anyway...

Seitan. Yeah. I've been making a lot of it lately. And I have been getting better and better at it. For the longest time I had a rough time making the stuff, but as they say, practice makes perfect. And while my seitan is not perfect, I will say that it's pretty good. And recently I have found a secret to make it even better.

Well in the entry I will share my own, special, super secret, super awesome seitan recipe. I usually don't follow recipes, but with seitan it's kind of important to get the proportions just right. Seitan is not something you can just whip up -- it's really hard to just eyeball the amounts of most of this stuff. This recipe is the culmination of years and years of fucking up.

Here's what you need and the amounts*:

Dry ingredients

2.25 cups of vital wheat gluten flour

7 tablespoons nutritional yeast flakes

4 tablespoons of garlic powder

Wet ingredients

1 cub of broth

0.5 cups soy sauce

5 tablespoons toasted sesame oil

2 teaspoons liquid smoke

*This makes a pretty large batch of seitan. If you want to make a smaller batch just use half of everything.

You want to thoroughly mix the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients together, separately. Then, in a large mixing bowl, add the wet to the dry. Some people suggest using a spoon for this, but I just use my hands. You are going to want to kneed this for several minutes until the dough is nice and elastic. Then I roll in into a log shaped form several inches thick and slice pieces about half to three-quarters inches each.

Then you put them into a stock pot with 10 cups of cool broth (or 8 cups of broth and 2 of soy sauce). It doesn't have to be cold -- room temperature is fine -- but it can't be warm. The turn the heat on high and bring it up to a boil. After it's boiling, put the

heat on medium low (high enough to where it still simmers) and cover for an hour.

The main ingredient that I'm sharing here with you is the toasted sesame oil. Like many culinary discoveries, it was made by accident. There's not really a cool story to

it; one time I was making seitan I was out of extra virgin olive oil (a sin, I know) and didn't feel like taking my lazy ass to the store. So I used a combination of canola oil and sesame oil. Turns out it was much better than usual. So I started using only sesame oil, and it's even better.

Seriously, this seitan is good enough it makes you wanna slap somebody. It's especially good to make barbecue sandwiches.

Update: I forgot something rather important. It's the final step to making the seitan. You drain it through a strainer (common sense there) and then you let it cool. When it's cooled off then you will need to squeeze the excess broth out. It will be very watery if you don't do this.

What, this blog still exists?

[a bunch of personal crap I deleted]

I never meant this blog to be a personal sounding board, but I also never intended to go months without posting on it. Oh well, I blame the chemical reactions in my brain that were a response to life changing events, maybe not all of them bad (buying a house, for example). I met some awesome people in the past several months. Some of it was through dating, some just randomly. I am moving on with my life now, and hope to blog more. Getting out of depression is hard. I hope it's not as hard to find out who I am now. I have heard the Japanese think that depression is a transformative experience. I can definitely see that.

I want to post a recipe to it has at least the pretence of relevance for this blog. Both my omni mom and Cokaru both loved this, and will testify to its beef stewedness. I just make this recipe up in my head, tried it, then wrote down what I did on my Facebook page. I was really happy with the results.

“Beef” (seitan) stew:

2 medium small onions, largely diced
3 carrots, chopped
3 small celery stalks I needed to use before they went bad, chopped
9 small red potatoes, chopped

^^ saute all this until the onions start to caramelize

Add in half a head of minced garlic, half a standard bag of frozen sweet peas, and the "beef" -- the equivalent of a standard (9oz?) package of seitan (though mine is homemade, so I eyeballed it. I use the recipe from The Veganomicon, which they also use here). Chop it up into chunks.

Deglaze with a bottle of Schlafly Oatmeal Stout. Add in several sprigs of rosemary, finely chopped and three bayleaves. Add some red pepper flakes, and the equivalent of a standard container of veggie broth (though I use Better than Bullion)

Bring it up to a boil, then simmer covered while you type what you just did on Facebook.

Get up to go stir it, tasting it to make sure it doesn't suck. I added an arrowroot slurry to thicken it up a bit.