preraphaelitepunk.com

Please forgive the slack blogging of late; the pollen has been wreaking havoc with my allergies, and I keep getting incapacitated by sinus headaches, ear-clogging and -popping unpleasantness, and other seasonal fun associated with breathing air that is little more than pollen soup at the moment. Drinking licorice root tea seems to be helping, though, and certainly tastes good. It’s also cheaper than OTC decongestants, and you don’t have to worry about whether the manufacturer is using nonvegan fillers.

In between headaches, I’ve been playing around with from-scratch seitan recipes. Nothing too groundbreaking, but I thought I’d record my findings. They are surely not news to the experienced seitan cook, I’m sure, but they may be somewhat helpful for someone else who’s still rather new to gluteny goodness, and at the very least it’ll make it less likely that I’ll forget what I’ve learned:

* Don’t bother using the food processor to knead your gluten. I did that the first few times, and it works, but it’s hardly worth the effort of cleaning out the processor work bowl afterward. Doing it by hand takes hardly any more preparation time at all, and saves on cleanup. (Also, processor-kneaded gluten is all weird-looking and lumpy, and the gluten is so rubbery it’s impossible to smooth out the bumps. Hand-kneaded gluten is much smoother and easier to mold.)

* Instead of adding herbs, garlic, nutritional yeast, etc., to the actual gluten (a la Vegan with a Vengeance), I’ve gotten to where I prefer simply adding them to the broth, and just mixing half gluten flour and half water to make the dough (a la La Dolce Vegan).[1] This makes a somewhat squishy dough at first, but it soon firms up nicely. I don’t know whether this approach affects the ultimate nutritional content, or how, though. Both approaches seem to yield equally good results; I just find the throw-it-in-the-broth approach a bit easier.

* Using a slow cooker for the simmering works nicely, but I think I’ll reserve this for weekend cooking, when I’m likely to be around to check the consistency periodically, instead of doing it during the week. The batch I made yesterday came out of the fridge about 7:00 in the morning and cooked until I got home about 6:00 in the evening, and resembles nothing more than a sponge. A yummy sponge, but not quite the consistency I’d been wanting. (Seriously, it squishes. Definitely overcooked.) I do like using the slow cooker on weekends, though, because the lower, consistent heat makes it easier to make dense, resilient seitan. Four to five hours seems to be quite long enough, though if you have a fancy-schmancy slow cooker with multiple temperature settings, you might be able to get away with a workday-long simmer without ending up with SpongeBob SeitanPants.

On a completely irrelevant note, I find it rather annoying that McAfee doesn’t let you renew your Internet protection suite while you’re using Firefox. Good thing I hadn’t gotten around to uninstalling IE yet. . . . Let’s just hope that the new installation, and upgrading from v. 7 to v. 8, doesn’t play silly buggers with my setup.

On a second irrelevant note, WordPress v. 2 seems to enjoy randomly removing visual space between paragraphs. I try to fix it when I spot it, but this may lead to inadvertent spamming of RSS feeds. My apologies if this happens, and also for any improperly-squeezed-together paragraphs I’ve missed.

[1] My two favorite vegan cookbooks — nay, favorite cookbooks, full stop.