COOK THE BOOK: ETHIOPIAN SEITAN AND PEPPERS (pg.167) w/ Homemade Seitan (pg.157) and Savory Crepes (pg.177)

Whoa. Fasten your seatbelts, things could get bumpy. We have been trying to make a date to go out for Ethiopian food but have yet to make it happen. Then we came across this recipe in VWAV and decided to give it a whirl.

In addition to hopefully satisfying our craving for Ethiopian food, this recipe also provided a chance to make something we had never, ever done before—our own Seitan. We're not actually huge fans of seitan but perhaps this homemade version would change our minds. Or not.

Seitan, sometimes nicknamed “wheat meat” is just that, a meat substitute with a texture similar to meat. It begins with wheat that is worked until most of the wheat is rinsed away and you are left with high protein gluten aka “wheat meat”. We used vital wheat gluten flour. Apparently this makes the process much easier with less washing and kneading, etc. . . It was enough work even with the vital wheat gluten so hooray for that.

So, homemade seitan, here goes:

In a bowl mix vital wheat gluten flour, nutritional yeast and all-purpose flour.

In a separate bowl mix vegetable broth, soy sauce, tomato paste, olive oil and lemon zest.

Pour wet into dry to combine. Knead resultant dough for 5 minutes until spongy and elastic, then let rest for 5 minutes.

Meanwhile make a broth out of vegetable stock and soy sauce.

Roll the dough into a log, 10” long, and cut into 6 equal pieces. Place pieces in cold broth. Partially cover pot and bring to a boil, then lower and gently simmer about an hour (turning every now and again).

After an hour turn off the heat, let broth and seitan cool at least 30 minutes. Remove from broth when absolutely cool. We then stored our seitan in the refrigerator for a few days until it was time for the main recipe.

I think we can all agree that this shiz looks scary. We should hold a contest to see who can come up with the best descriptions of what this stuff looks like! I’ll start: Elephant dung. Very large elephant dung. Aren’t you hungry now?

Time to make Ethiopian Seitan and Peppers.

Begin by removing the elephant dung, oops, I mean seitan from the refrigerator and cut inot strips, about ½ inch thick. Cut two green peppers into 1inch strips. Layer the seitan on bottom of 9x13 baking dish and cover with the peppers.

Make the “sauce” by blending:

Serrano chiles (we used jalapenos), 1T fresh ginger, 2 garlic, 1t cumin, ¼ t each cardamom, turmeric, cloves, and cinnamon, ½ c. red wine (we used white w/a

splash of red wine vinegar) and 3T olive oil.

Pour the sauce over seitan and peppers, cover and bake at 400F for 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes uncover, stir and bake another 20 minutes. Done!

To stand in for the injera, which is a spongy Ethiopian bread they serve at EVERY meal VWAV uses a pretty easy crepe recipe. As utensils are not used when eating Ethiopian food this bread is used to pick up bites of food and deliver them to your mouth. Dig it.

The crepes were made from a ratio of 3 parts A.P. flour to 1 part chickpea flour, a bit of salt and olive oil and water to make a fairly thin crepe batter. The batter is rested for at least ½ hour in the ‘frig then cooked into thin crepes in a non-stick skillet.

The Results: Well, it smelled really good. The seitan was a very good approximation of what we have purchased at the store (or got as Faux chicken when eating out) for much more money. The addition of soy in the cooking broth gave the seitan good flavor but also turned it the color of excrement. I’ll let y’all do your own cost/benefit analysis on that topic.

Time to eat. The texture remained a bit spongy and it may have served the end result better by giving it a minute or two under the broiler. Eric ate his portion, with the crepes and some jasmine rice and proclaimed it, “Not bad, though not my favorite texture” while Meghan, perhaps influenced a bit by the looks of it, could not get by the texture, took one bite and proclaimed it . . . Well, to be honest, she didn’t proclaim anything, she went to the trash can and spit it out. The sauce was bright with ginger and made your li

ps tingle from the chile peppers—good stuff. Not enough to save this meal though.

As a ringing endorsement of the Savory Crepes however, Meghan ate quite a few of them with Earth Balance and real Maple Syrup and was quite pleased.

Conclusion:

The seitan came out pretty much the way it was supposed and we realized we just aren’t huge fans of seitan. It makes a pretty good faux meat, especially chicken, and may be useful if cut into smaller portion and cooked in a way that firms the final product up a bit more than the semi-spongy result we got. We have quite a bit leftover and may chop it up a bit more and go for a stir fry type preparation. All in all it was fun to try something new but did NOT satisfy our desire for good Ethiopian food.

EPILOGUE:

Seitan, I can't quit you! As an attempt to eat up some of the leftovers and inspired by the seitan's resemblance to meatloaf I cooked up some hearty seitan slabs, slathered them with some toppings and went for a faux meatloaf sandwich. Even after an attempt at improving the texture under the broiler it was still offputting. I ate it though.