1,000 Vegan Recipes: Simple Simmered Seitan

I had some plain yogurt leftover from a couple of weeks ago and wanted to use it up, so I decided to vegetarianize the Chicken Korma recipe from "India's 500 Best Recipes" by Shehzad Husain, Rafi Fernandez, Mridula Baljekar, and Manisha Kanani. Lately I have been baking my seitan, but I decided to try the Simple Simmered Seitan recipe from "1,000 Vegan Recipes" by Robin Roberts. The ingredients might already be in your kitchen- olive oil, soy sauce, garlic, and vital wheat gluten flower. I had everything I needed on hand except onion powder, so I substituted asafoetida. If you've never smelled asafoetida, it's quite an interesting spice. I usually hear that it smells like a stinky foot, but I think it smells like cat urine. Don't worry though, the smell goes away when cooked, and it has an onion-garlic flavor rather than a foot-urine flavor!

Robin Roberts says in the cookbook that she usually makes a double batch and freezes some of it. Sounded like a perfect idea to me, so I did the same. After mixing the dough, I had a little bit too much liquid, so I poured some of it out and added a bit of vital wheat gluten. That solved the problem, and left me with a big hunk of baby seitan.


I cut the dough into eight roughly equal pieces and put them in the simmering liquid in a giant pot. At first the dough sunk to the bottom of the bowl, but after some time it began to rise to the top.


After about 45 minutes of simmering, I realized I should have used two large pots. The seitan had doubled in size and it looked like the pot would overflow with seitan cutlets!


Once an hour of simmering had passed, I turned off the heat and let the seitan cool down a bit while I prepped the ingredients for the Chicken Korma. I also tore off a few pieces of seitan to munch on. The seitan was very lightly spiced and would work well in a variety of recipes. If you made the seitan with a specific recipe in mind, you could easily add spices to the dough with your meal in mind. I think boiled seitan works much better than baked seitan in the stir-frys and Indian meals I make. Baked seitan is much more dense, and it is better to use as sausage, pepperoni, or ground meat.

I have about 3 pounds of seitan left in my fridge, so I shouldn't need more seitan for a while. But when I do run out, I'm looking forward to experimenting with difference spices in this basic seitan recipe.

Walnut Disaster

During my first year of law school, my contracts professor gave us his famous hypothetical. We were to imagine that a man invited a potential client to dinner, and made a luxurious souffle with walnuts and truffles. Unfortunately, the walnuts were rancid. How much could the man recover from the shop that sold him the rancid walnuts that ruined his super expensive souffle and made his business deal go sour?

Well, I still don't know the answer to that, but I was reminded of this hypo after trying out the Eggplant with Pomegranate Walnut Sauce from 1,000 Vegan Recipes tonight. A friend had commented in class that any good cook would have tasted the walnuts while making the souffle. I'm ashamed to admit that I tried the walnuts I was using in this dish- and realized I didn't remember what raw walnuts are supposed to taste like. I can't remember the last time I had a walnut- much less a raw one rather than a toasted one. I also can't remember when I bought the bag of walnuts sitting in my pantry that I decided to open up for this dish. Bad call.

I thought the walnuts had a slightly funny aftertaste, but thought the taste would go away when the walnuts were cooked. It didn't. The result was edible, but well, yeah, it was just edible. So, while I would love to review my first recipe from 1,000 Vegan Recipes, I really can't. Some day I'll try the recipe again, or wait for one of the ladies at "Cooking from 1,000 Vegan Recipes" to do it, but for tomorrow I'll turn these fried eggplant slices into Eggplant Parmesan.

As it turns out, the package of walnuts said "Best by Nov 13 2009", which just so happens to be the very day I made the dish. They probably would have kept better if I had put them in the fridge. Oh well, happy Friday the 13th!