Homemade Seitan Recipe

Perfect for a lazy Sunday afternoon, here's a recipe for homemade Seitan as adapted from The Angelica Home Kitchen cookbook. It takes about 10-minutes to form the dough and knead it, 30-minutes to let it soak (plenty of time to prep the other ingredients), 20-30 min. to rinse, and 2 hours to let simmer in broth.

2 lbs. unbleached white all purpose flour (equals roughly 6 1/2 cups)
2 lbs. whole wheat bread flour
6 c. cold water

-Combine the flours, add the water and knead until you have a smooth and firm ball of dough. You may need a little extra flour for this process to get beyond the tacky consistency.
Place this ball of dough in a large bowl and cover with warm water for 30-min.

While the dough is resting, get your broth ingredients together.
1 large yellow onion cut into large pieces
3 carrots cut into large pieces
2-3 stalks of Celery, cut into large pieces
4-5 cloves of garlic cut in half
1 piece of ginger about 3" long chopped up
3 sprigs of thyme
2 bay leaves
1 tsp. black peppercorns
2 leaves of fresh cooking sage
1 1/2 c. Shoyu or Tamari
1 gallon of water
Place all ingredients into a stock pot.

After 30-min. dump the water out that the seitan was soaking in and place the dough into a colander, put the colander into a bowl.
Fill the bowl with cold water and gently knead the ball of dough for 5 minutes.
Dump the starchy water and fill the bowl back up with cold water while gently kneading for another 5-min. The dough should have the consistency of a bowl of wet socks.
Dump the starchy water and fill the bowl back up with cold water while kneading the dough for another 5-min.
Dump the water and fill with warm water and knead the dough until the water starts washing out clearly. About 5-10 min.
For the last 5-min. rinse again with cold water. The water should be relatively clear by now and the dough should be firmer and about 1/2 the size from what you started with.

Seperate the dough into 2 or 4 smaller balls. Add to the stock pot, bring to a boil, simmer for 2 hours. Try to keep the seitan submerged under the water if you can. I used a glass bowl that was heavy enough to weigh down on the seitan that was bobbing up.

I apologize for the lame video. I've never used iMovie before and don't know how to add effects or Text. It should help a little though, right?


voila!