Homemade Seitan Recipe

Whether you're a vegan, a vegetarian, or an omnivore, seitan is a delicious and healthy meat alternative you can easily make at home. Here's a simple, tasty, seasonal recipe for homemade seitan with kale and squash.

Homemade Seitan Recipe Remember first was World Vegan Day so I thought it would be fun to learn how to make Homemade Seitan which is a popular vegan meat substitute, also known as wheat meat. Veganism is a philosophy in lifestyle who is adherent to refrain from consuming, wearing, or in any other way, exploiting animals or animal by-products. Generally, Vegans define animals as anything that comes from an egg, which means that honey, since it comes from bees to come from eggs, is not vegan. Seitan is wheat gluten which is derived from working and washing all of the starch out of a flour based dough. Of course you can buy a package to pre-made seitan but the package seitan is usually unflavored. And I want to be able to add my own seasonings. To make seitan you need 2 ½ pounds of flour, about two cups of water or vegetable broth, ½ cup of soy sauce or tamari, or Bragg’s liquid aminos, and two tablespoons of nutritional yeast, and whatever seasonings you like. Form this into dough. And when you can no longer mix it by hand in the bowl, turn it out onto a floured work surface and work it for 20 minutes. This means a lot of kneading. You need to get the gluten in the flour activated. So you need to knead it like crazy for 20 minutes until its shiny, smooth, and very, very elastic. Put it back in the bowl and then start washing the starch out of it. Start washing your dough under warm water. Knead the dough under the water and you’ll see the starch starting to wash out. Repeat this as many times as necessary until the water runs clear, making sure that the water is a little bit colder every time. This can take anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes. Make sure you get all of the starch out. You might think that you have it out from the surface but there’s actually a lot more starch inside so you may need to break up the seitan into smaller pieces in order to work out all the starch. After the water is running clear to your seitan, turn it back out onto your work surface and form it into a log. Now there’s a lot of work to get the seitan to this point. If you don’t have a time for it, that’s fine. There is a shortcut, all of these kneading and rinsing, and kneading and rinsing, and kneading and rinsing. It’s called the vital wheat gluten and it is essentially the flour with all of the starch already rinsed off. I use the full box and I added in two cups of vegetable broth. Again the advantage of using vital wheat gluten over buying the pre-made seitan is that you can control the flavors. Before you put in any liquids, you can add in whatever seasonings, spices or herbs you want. The seitan at this stage will feel kind of like chewing gum and it look sort of like a big gray sponge. Trust me it will end up tasting much better than it looks. At this point, whether or not you’ve made the seitan completely from scratch or with the vital wheat gluten, turn it onto your work surface and form it into a log. Let it rest for about five minutes and then using a pair of clean kitchen shears, cut it into medallions, strips, or into flat patties. Whatever you do, make sure that you cut it smaller than you think you actually want it. This will expand like crazy when you boil it. Fill up a pot of water or vegetable stock and bring it to a boil. You can add in seasonings like garlic, bay leaf, peppercorns, it’s totally up to you depending what you’re going to end up doing with the seitan later. Once your liquid is boiling, add the seitan in piece by piece and then simmer. Cook for about 45 minutes on a simmer. You’ll see the seitan is going to expand like crazy. So make sure you use a large pot. We’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, I’m going to show you what to do with the seitan. At this point you can do whatever you want with the seitan. To complete my seitan dish, I want it something that is healthy and seasonal. So I peeled and chopped one butternut squash, and one head of kale, and steamed both for about five minutes or until they were just fork tender. Pat your seitan and dry it. Squeeze some of the extra liquid out of it. Then dredge it in a mixture of flour, salt, and pepper, or whatever seasonings you want. Then I sautéed my seitan in a pan of olive oil and when it was brown on both sides, I removed it and then added in my kale and my squash. I seasoned my vegetables with plenty of fresh black pepper, sea salt, crushed red pepper flakes and some balsamic vinegar. Once the vegetables were pretty much cooked through, I add in my seitan back to the pan, toss it to coat, when it cooks for just a few minutes on medium heat. When everything was done, serve it up and it made for a delicious, healthy vegan meal. Because seitan is such a blink palate there’s a ton of different ways you can cook it. You can make an Italian dish with your seitan by adding dried rosemary and thyme to your wheat gluten or flour mixture before you add in any liquids, and then you can simmer your seitan in tomato sauce or you could give your seitan an Indian flare by seasoning it with cumin, coriander, and curry, and then mix again into pureed spinach or kale for sag seitan into the sag mere. Package seitan usually cost about $5.00 to $6.00 for one to two servings. If you make seitan yourself, the whole thing will cost you about $2.00 to $4.00 and that’s including any stocks or seasonings you use in the seitan. Don’t forget, you can also keep the cost down by using a homemade vegetable stock that we showed you on our pantry episode. And you can use whatever seasonings you have lying around. So all together, my homemade seitan with kale and squash, came to about $2.00 per person. Way cheaper than I’ve ever had in any vegan restaurant and just as delicious. If you’ve ever made homemade seitan before or if you even know how to make homemade tofu, write in and let me know because I would love to see a homemade tofu recipe. Let me know what your favorite vegan recipes are and we’ll see you next week on Working Class Foodies. Check out some of our other episodes to find recipes that would go great with this dish by clicking any of these boxes around my face.