I do love seitan. Most often I eat it plain or in barbecue sauce or in a stir fry. As I said in the last post, I’m looking for diversification of my seitan eating, so I tried this one, from Vegan With a Vengeance, the best all-vegan cookbook I own:
2 cups Seitan
2 tsp olive oil
1 onion (~1 cup), thickly sliced
1 green bell pepper, seeded & thickly sliced
Marinade:
1/2 large white onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic
1 1/2 tbsp ginger (fresh)
3 tbsp lime juice (fresh)
3 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp pure maple syrup
1 tbsp ground allspice
1/4 tbsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tbsp ground cayenne
1 tsp ground nutmeg
Throw all the marinade ingredients into a food processor and chop it up real good. There’ll be some chunks left and that’s okay. I doubled the amount of garlic because I always double the amount of garlic. Marinate the seitan in the marinade for a while, at least an hour.
Sautee the other onion and bell pepper in the olive oil until the onions start to brown. Take the seitan from the marinade and put it in the skillet. Do not throw out the remaining marinade. It’s good stuff. Sautee the seitan until it’s browned to your liking. Add the remaining marinade and heat through. Eat.
I wasn’t as wild about this as I thought I would be. There’s two things that might have caused this:
1)I used a slightly different recipe for making the seitan. The recipe I use calls for chickpea flour, which I don’t have and can’t get cheaply, so I just add more vital wheat gluten. This time, I substituted soy flour (thinking they were comparable because of the seitan pastrami recipe). It made the seitan fluffier and less tasty.
2)With few exceptions, I have a problem with using high quality stuff when I’m just going to mix it. This is why, if I order a whiskey and coke, I get the rail instead of something good. I mean, what’s the point? So here, I didn’t use my good maple syrup, but the crappy $1.29 stuff at the grocery store. Stuff doesn’t even taste good alone, and I think it adversely affected the flavor of the marinade.
Overall, it wasn’t bad, but too labor intensive for me to do it again any time soon. The flavor went really well with coconut rice; combined, it was greater than the sum of the parts.