Vegan MoFo Day #12!
So these picture may be from back in February, but no matter! My friend Gulliver from Herbivorus Rex visited me awhile back, and he is my kitchen soul-mate and much braver than I, as he managed to turn flour into veggie meat, while I always cheat and use gluten flour. Pretty much all of the credit for this post goes to him, I just hopped around excitedly while taking photos and then ate the end product. Mmm. This is not so much of a recipe, because there were not so many ingredients. Basically, a high quality bread flour, water, then season at the end and fry that shit. Pictures help conceptualize things though, right? So here you go:
The flour is in the bowl.
Pour some water in there, but only a little bit right now. Stir it up!
Make a big sticky ball, like so.
You want it to all stick together, look at those gluten strands! Extra points if it looks like a floppy wet monkey, see above.
Find a bowl. Put the gooey flour blob inside. Cover with water. Massage it. Like it. The water will get filled with the starch, like so:
Pour out the starchy white gross water, put the blob back into the bowl, cover with water again, massage, rinse, repeat.
If you want you can squeeze it like this. Yes, this will become edible.
Keep going until the water stops being so white and starchy. Apparently eventually the water will stay rather clear, but we got lazy after awhile. Knead in some salt, garlic powder, nutritional yeast, paprika, whatever you want. We breaded ours too, then fried them. Ohhhh yeah.
The finished product…well…almost. We didn’t fry them yet here. There were not pictures after frying because we moved them immediately into our stomachs.
I have now achieved Level 7 of veganism…amiright?
But really, it wasn’t quite so intimidating as I thought! Thanks for poppy my totally homemade wheat meat cherry, Gulli!
Of course, if this is too much you can always just make it with wheat gluten instead. See How to Make Seitan: An llustrated Guide for more info and instructions! Alternatively, you can check out my How to Make Seitan App, which has pictures of every single step and 10 different recipes from sausages to cutlets and more. If you have an Android or iPhone, I got you covered!
I would officially like to make it clear I’ve lost a lot of weight since then.
Hahah I’d really love to try this sometime! Thank you for sharing the love of food! 🙂
It is not ‘cheating using Vital Gluten.No more than it is cheating using Almond beverage instead of the expensive by scratch Almond Beverage. Almond hovering around $8 lb. Long ago a group of vegan chef and I were shocked when we measured the amount of water use to make seitan from wheat flour. As I recall about 20x than with Vital Gluten.
@Anonymous 8:17 – Good point! I wonder if the factories that make the vital wheat gluten also use a lot of water though? I actually know nothing about the process!
suppose you got lazy rinsing it? what will happen? the effort intimidates me. 😀
It would just be less dense and chewy and more bread-y I suppose!