In situ
Seitan innovation
April 3, 2008
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Dutch Seitan Designers at workshop
Last Sunday was the final day of Platform 21’s Cooking and Constructing exhibition, and amidst the fiery debate and seitan design workshop, no one expected that any true innovation would take place. But due to the emphasis on show and do, I had to rush through my normal procedure and the result was a surprisingly newer-better-faster, less pain-in-the-assier method for making seitan. Scratch the lengthy steaming process of my previous recipe (otherwise a great recipe) and opt for a 20 minute boil instead. This will produce a better texture and a 1 hour cooking process.
The fact that we can now make seitan in 1/4 of the time just reinforces my notion that most recipes we think of as being time-consuming, can be simplified enough to become something doable. Think of Richard Bertinet’s bread that is easy enough to just whip up whilst cooking dinner. Think of my homemade pasta 23 Layer Lasagne that is a magnificent hot mess of heaven. Recipes can be simplified, what an effing relief!
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Instead of steaming the gluten dough for hours and hours, try tossing it into some boiling water for 20 minutes. The result is a puffier texture, making the deep-frying that follows, more effective. Boil the gluten in water for ~20 minutes, or until the gluten floats to the top. (The mage above is of deepfrying.)
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Ivan burns his fingers on some deflated seitan.
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The new and improved culiblog way to make seitan. Don’t steam for 120 minutes, boil for 20, followed by a 5 minute deepfry, and proceed as usual. Seitan prepared this way takes around an hour, and you’ll only be busy with it for a fraction of this time.
Culiblog’s 25 minute 23 Layer Lasagne recipe
Richard Bertinet’s wonderful traditional French bread making technique explained in Dough.
debra at 20:53 | Comments (0) | post to del.icio.us
Glutinous Maximus II,
Seitanic Lab Meat recipe
March 28, 2008
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Loaves of Seitan during steaming process
Like the soybean, like bread, like fish, like wine, like salt, seitan is part of the utopian food group, foods laden with morality, infused with ritual, oozing with culture, drowning in history. Seitan is desperately in need of appropriation from its association with macrobiotics but on the positive side is bound to the discussion of the ethical implications of lab meat and the effect of industrialized food on our local/global economies and environment.
At last year’s Lab Meat debate and dinner at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, I expounded on why the creation of industrial meat substitutes is not sustainable and why Lab Meat proponents may be (inadvertently) greenwashing environmentally unfriendly tissue labs. Like a vegan appropriating the meaty recipes of pop-chef Anthony Bourdain, I offered several sustainable meat substitutes well-rooted in the whole foods firmament and explained how we all can make make lab meat with flour and water, in the lab that we commonly refer to as our kitchen.
This Sunday I’ll be in another lab meat debate, with a.o., esteemed scientific ethicist Cor van der Weele. The venue is Amsterdam’s Platform 21, on the final day of the Cooking and Constructing exhibition, at 16.00h. If you’re in Amsterdam and want to join in the preceding seitan workshop that I will be giving, write, call, or simplly show up on Sunday at 15:00h. There are still a few spaces open for participants.
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1 cup gluten flour, 1 heaping tbs white flour
Recipe/technique for making Seitan (serves ±4)
- 1 cup gluten flour
1 heaping tbs unbleached white flour
(pinch of sea salt)
water
peanut oil
Seitan marinade
- water
soy sauce
rice wine vinegar
juniper berries
dried shitake mushrooms
ginger
marmalade
bay leaves
garlic
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01: Mix the flours with a fork until fluffed and drizzle with water, tablespoon by tablespoon. Stir this mixture sloppily and within seconds it will start to bind together. When it looks like a large piece of spent chewing gum, you’re ready to form it into loaves for steaming.
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02: Steam the wheat meat loaves for at least 2 hrs over a fiercely boiling pot of water. Not unlike raw octopus meat, gluten needs to be processed before achieving good mouth feel.
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03: All done steaming
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04: Test the texture by cutting off the ends and popping them in your mouth for a test-chew. You don’t need to be an expert, if the gluten is fun to eat, it’s good, if chewing glute starts to feel like aerobic exercise, it’s bad. If too chewy, you can best just start over, as it has to do with the amount of white flour you added in the beginning; too little flour equals too chewy.
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05: Deep fry the loaves for at least 5 minutes. Don’t protest and think you can skip this step, because it radically transforms the texture into something delicious, even for folks that don’t wear goat wool socks.
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06: Put all of the ingredients of the marinade into a large pot on a medium flame, add the seitan and braise for up to 2 hours. Later you can store the seitan in the braising juices in the fridge.
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07: When cooking with seitan, treat it as if it were tofu or tempeh. It’s already mostly ‘cooked’, so you just need to add it to whatever you like, fire up the flavours and get it warm.
Some folks liken seitan’s texture to duck meat. I think that these people have probably never eaten a properly prepared duck in their lives. Seitan can be really very good, but not in the same way that meat can be good. And this ultimately is the problem that I have with the notion of the meat substitute. Foods need to be enjoyed for what they are, for their inherent qualities, not for how well they exude an I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-bacon!-feeling.
Seitan can be truly sublime and delicious, but to my knowledge (which is to say, to Google and Wikipedia’s knowledge) I’m sure that no one has ever uttered the words, I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-seitan!
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Culiblog’s debunks myths about seitan and a homestyle guide to gluten harvesting
Last year’s Lab Meat debate and dinner at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht
debra at 17:59 | Comments (6) | post to del.icio.us
Haute cuisine
bitterbal snack innovation
March 23, 2008
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From golden-brown to white, spinach-gorgonzola, mango-mirin and thai coconut bitterballs
From the original creator of Amsterdam’s Supperclub (the real one, not the other one), Chef Thor is now ready to debut his latest collection of bitterballs. The bitterbal is a ‘traditional’ Dutch drinking snack, a round, deep-fried croquette filled with molten lava. The national joke is that each time you eat a portion of bitterballs you will burn and blister your tongue. In terms of national jokes I do prefer masochistic snacks to ignorant politicians with absurd notions about national identity, although lately we seem to be multi-tasking pretty well.
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Molten spinach gorgonzola lava
Chef Thor’s ‘love bites’ come in a collection of three different flavour combinations; spinach-gorgonzola, sweet teriyaki mango, and thai coconut curry with curry with peas. Voss has spent the past year developing the recipe in conjunction with Dutch bitterbal snack company, van Dobbe.
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The unsurpassable Croqueta d’Amor, 7 flavours
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Get ’em all
debra at 12:50 | Comments (3) | post to del.icio.us
