The holidays are over. You’re bankrupt, but not to worry, everyone’s happy with the gift you bought which they secretly returned a week later. Now, you have to save money. To do this, you will need a little help from seitan.
Seitan requires the wonderful mistress you know as gluten and a lot of it – the wonderful substance that makes bread, beer, cake, crust, pastries, dough and whiskey amazing. Seitan needs a considerable amount of gluten to come to fruition, specifically vital wheat gluten. Now, all you need is a little bit of chickpea flour and water. Chickpea flour helps soften up seitan; no one wants tough seitan. From here, your imagination is everything, flavor your seitan however you like.
Begin with using it as a meat substitute. Make it taste like chicken for some kickass tacos or crumble it up and smother it in some gravy for breakfast. There is a suggested recipe below.
Seitan makes tofu’s existence worthless. It has a wonderful chewy texture with substance and bite. It’s super versatile and can be used in pretty much anything you want to make – all without impacting the environment. It is also an excellent source of protein for vegetarians. It is perfect as just another ingredient you can use to make your food seem different. Seitan only costs about $2 to make. It is 100 percent vegan and only takes an hour to make, even in large quantities. If this isn’t enough reason to make it, the ingredients are easy to find. Any health foods store will have vital wheat gluten and chickpea flour. The rest can easily be found at any local supermarket.
Recipe: (or Google it, honestly, there are so many options to choose from)
The base:
- 1 cup of vital wheat gluten
- 1.5 cup of vegetable broth, imitation chicken broth or any other broth you want
- ¼ cup of chickpea flour
Flavoring:
- ⅓ cup nutritional yeast
- 1 tsp garlic powder
- 1 tsp cayenne pepper
- 1 tsp curry powder
- 1 tsp onion powder
- 1 tbsp salt
- 2 tbsp olive oil
Instructions:
- Begin by mixing everything together in a medium-sized mixing bowl
- Once the dough forms, knead for four minutes or more
- Let the dough rest for 10 minutes
- Then knead for another minute
- Cut into fourths and wrap in tinfoil
- Steam for 30 minutes