Homemade Seitan

If I'm going to make seitan steaks for dinner this week -- ideally tonight -- I really need to make more seitan.  This is an easy recipe, but a rather time consuming one, so I prefer to do it well in advance of dinnertime and just keep them on hand, ready to eat whenever.  I'm not sure where the recipe originally came from since it's been reposted all over the web, but this one from Epicurious.com is the one I use.  My version below includes a few modifications for personal taste and availability of ingredients.  It will always be cheaper to make these than to buy seitan ready made from a store, but if you want to make them really cheap, you can do what I do and buy the vital wheat gluten flour by the case from Amazon.  It stays good in the freezer for upwards of a year and, for me at least, it's always used up months before that.

I typically make a double batch of these and then keep them in the freezer until I use them since they have a limited lifespan in the fridge (maybe a week at the most).  You can grind them up in a food processor to make a ground beef substitute (great for spaghetti sauce), slice them up and use them in stir fry, or keep them whole and serve them as breaded chicken-fried-steak-esque steaks, like I plan to do tonight.  Sameer even likes them plain, straight from the broth, but I personally think they need to be seasoned and browned first.

Ingredients

Gluten Dough:
2 cups vital wheat gluten flour
2 teaspoon granulated garlic
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 1/4 cups vegetable broth (or warm water with a tablespoon of vegetable Better Than Bouillon)
3 Tablespoons reduced sodium tamari or Bragg liquid aminos (full-sodium soy sauce makes them too salty)

Broth:
4 cups water
1/4 cup reduced sodium tamari, soy sauce, or Bragg liquid aminos
4 slices of ginger (optional)

Directions
Gluten dough:
Combine all dry ingredients and mix thoroughly. Combine all liquids and add to the dry mixture; mix with a fork until the dough reaches a kneadable consistency. Knead a couple of dozen times, then let the dough rest 3-5 minutes.

Wet hands (to prevent gluten from sticking) and knead another dozen times, then let the dough rest another 10 minutes. While waiting, prepare broth (below).

Wet hands and a knife; cut gluten into 6-8 pieces and pull into thin strips.  Add to boiling broth, bring back to a boil (you'll know the seitan are cooked when they start to float) and then simmer, covered, for one hour.

Broth:
Combine all broth ingredients in a large pot with a lid. Bring broth to a boil, add gluten dough pieces, bring to a boil again, cover and reduce to a simmer for one hour. Check occasionally and add more water if needed.

Tip:  This dough is exceptionally sticky.  The bowl used for mixing the dough will be easier to clean out if you let the remnants dry complete and scrape them out, rather than try to rinse or scrub them out.