Praise Seitan indeed.

A couple months ago I bought a box of seitan quick mix from Cosmo’s. My thinking was that since I had no idea how to make it, I would get this easy “throw it together” mix to see if I even liked seitan before diving in too making my own (at that time I thought seitan production was a hideous, long-term process).

It was terrible, gross, and worst of all, bland. It definitely put me off seitan for awhile. After all, I’d never had it before and for all I knew all seitan tasted like floury eraser.

The offending seitan

Recently, after seeing post after post on blogs and vegan sites pictures of seitan that actually looked like it might really be food, I decided that I would once again venture into the experiment.

Because of my girl-crush on Isa Chandra Moskowitz, I used the seitan recipe from Vegan with a Vengence. So I started the cooking process. After making the wheat-meat, it is supposed to be brought to a boil in broth (yep, those are bouillon cubes you see) and then simmered for an hour.

After the hour is up, you let it rest for 30 minutes. What did I take the lid off too?

Floating turd seitan. My boyfriend’s boyish humor would be so satisfied. :p

Ok, that might have been crude.

Then I tasted some.

Now, most of the time when people make seitan like I did above it’s to be used in a future recipe. But I was dying to taste it because it actually smelled pretty good. So I just had a chunk with some leftover pasta for lunch. And let me tell you – it was damn good. I immediately regretted ever trusting a boxed seitan product as such a poor introduction to such an incredible food.

For dinner I tried another of Isa’s recipes from the same cookbook, the Jerk Seitan. Instead of marinating it for just an hour as the recipe specified, I marinated mine for almost four. I wasn’t too hopeful at first because I wasn’t liking the way the marinade smelled. However, there’s a burrito place close to me that serves jerk tofu and I love the seasonings, so I kept on with the recipe.

Here’s it being fried up with a thawed pepper-onion mix:

I served it with Mahatma saffron rice (which for some reason stuck to the bottom of my pan – it’s never done that before).

I ate way, way too much because it was so delicious. I ended up eating this whole bowl, which was all the seitan (maybe 1 1/2 cups), plus most of the rice.

I’m so proud of myself for successfully making seitan. I see much more worshiping in the near future. 🙂