For my Mom’s birthday we decided to make Pecan Crusted Seitan from the Kind Life cookbook.  Since we also intended to try to make Seitan from the Sarah Kramer cookbook ‘La Dolce Vegan!: Vegan Livin’ Made Easy,’ and we had some time I dug in and determined to do it ourselves!  Seitan is a great meat alternative, and we like to use it to replace chicken in a lot of dishes.  Don’t get me wrong, the West Soy ‘Chicken Flavored’ seitan is absolutely awesome, but it’s also pricey, and it comes in small pieces and odd shaped pieces.  For this particular recipe, we thought it would be better to have small ‘cutlet’ shaped or filet type pieces of seitan versus the odd shaped ones we get in the premade seitan.  So we pulled out the recipe and got to it.  The recipe is essentially just wheat gluten and water.  You can boil it in a mixture of water and spices or flavors that you choose in order to season it more.  We chose not to add some of the spices recommended and just boiled it in nutritional yeast, water and soy sauce.  After that we baked it for about 15 minutes to get it a bit more solid.

It was more spongy than chewy, but it was still very very good.  And a lot cheaper to make than to purchase!  It’s $4.99 for a pound at Whole Foods, versus probably $1 or less to make.

I am going to post the recipe as found in Sarah Kramer’s La Dolce Vegan! But we adjusted the water and flavor recipes to our liking, I suggest you do the same J

Basic Instant Gluten:

½ cup instant vital wheat gluten flour
½ cup water

*it is suggested that it makes 2 large or 4 small servings

Faux Chicken:

2 cups water
¼ cup nutritional yeast
2 tbsp tamari (soy sauce)
1 tsp onion powder
1 tsp dried sage
½ tsp dried thyme
½ tsp salt
¼ tsp celery seed

*you are to bring this to a boil and slice the gluten into steaks or slices and drop it into the broth.  Then you simmer for 50-60 minutes and either use it immediately or feeze for use up to 6 months; via fridge it suggests its good for 6 days.

**we did use the onion powder, and I always replace salt with garlic salt, as I am a garlic fanatic; and I did not use the sage or thyme or celery seed.  I hate celery for some reason so we left that totally out.  And we at least doubled the nutritional yeast.  It was quite tasty!