Veganomicon: Suateed Seitan with Mushrooms and Spinach

I will be the first to admit that this is not the most appetizing photo... But this dish was sooo good. Paul and I both love seitan, and I usually buy the Chicken-Style seitan from White Wave. The first seitan I ever tasted was one that I made myself when I was just a teenager in my mother's kitchen. I think that I had come across a vague description of what seitan was calling it a protein source made from kneading wheat dough and rinsing away the starches in water. I used flour, probably bread flour, made a dough out of it and then proceeded to knead and rinse he dough in the kitchen sink under running water. I don't even think that I used broth to boil it in, just water. But what resulted was as close to the White Wave seitan as I've ever come. Most recipes for home-made seitan use lots of flavor ingredients and vital wheat gluten flour. The result is, shall we say, globular. I think that the process of kneading and then washing out the starches later produces longer chains of gluten which give the seitan a more definite grain pattern rather than the chaotic grain of seitan made with vital wheat gluten flour. Of course this is all just conjecture based on a singular incident when I was very young, and I haven't bothered to test this hypothesis.

The Veganomicon recipe for Simple Seitan produces a seitan that isn't pretty to look at, but the flavor is really quite good. I'm glad that the authors simplified the recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance down to a more reasonable list of ingredients. The Sauteed Seitan with Mushrooms and Spinach was delightful. Paul and I both loved it. I served it with quinoa cooked in the rice cooker using the broth that the seitan was boiled in. Unfortunately I should have tasted the dish before adding the salt that the recipe calls for because the end result was too salty even for Paul who usually salts up anything I cook regardless of how much salt I add while cooking, I've stopped trying to compensate for his love of salt altogether. Having said all that, this dish was so good that we ate it all anyway.