Wrestling the Blob

A couple of days ago I had an interesting experience with a ball of protein.

More specifically, this was a culinary experience, and the protein was wheat gluten. You're probably salivating already, no?

The form of wheat gluten that's used as a meat substitute is known as seitan. I've had seitan several times, and my experiences can be summarized thusly: when it tries too hard to simulate meat, it's gross. Seriously, if you want and expect a piece of chicken or pork, seitan might actually make you gag. But if you can get away from any meat pretensions, it's fine. Unobjectionable.

I read that the stuff isn't terribly challenging to make, so I decided to give it a go. The first recipe I found called for a cup of regular flour mixed with a cup of bread flour (the latter has a higher gluten content). These are combined with just enough water to form a ball of dough. This mass is then washed and kneaded constantly under running water for 20-30 minutes. This rinses away starch, leaving just the gluten behind. The comments that accompanied the instructions made the procedure sound a bit like wrestling the Blob for half an hour. I expected that this would be fun for approximately three of the prescribed thirty minutes.

The second recipe I came across offered a considerably more direct approach: buy gluten, mix with water. Done and done. Adding water formed an elastic dough more or less on contact with the gluten. This was kind of cool. Mixing cement probably works basically the same way. I was hopeful that the end products would prove to be vastly different.

After mixing the dough, I halfheartedly kneaded it for a few minutes. This step, while not absolutely necessary, apparently will yield a better texture. Next, I cut the dough into small chunks, and put these in a pot of boiling vegetable broth.

Hungry yet?

An hour later, I removed the faintly gefilte fish-esque nuggets from the hot broth. At this point, based solely on appearance, I was about 75% certain that there was no way this crap was going to be any good. At all. But I soldiered on. Now, the seitan was ready to be used in a recipe. I chose a basic piccata from a popular NYC vegan joint's cookbook. It included all of the classic ingredients you might expect: lemon, wine, capers...soy margarine. I followed the directions to the letter.

The end product was surprisingly decent. The seitan would absolutely never, ever be confused for meat. However, it had a pleasantly chewy texture to it, and it didn't taste like shit - allowing the unequivocally excellent sauce to be the star of the show. My simple yardstick for judging any food item is whether or not I'd choose to eat it again, and the answer here was yes.

So I'll give this another shot in the future. Maybe I'll even try the full-on shortcut-less version. I could probably use the exercise.