Heil Seitan!

For quite a while I have been embracing and incorporating vegetarianism into all parts of my lifestyle. This gradual shift wasn't intentional. I believe it was fueled by the amount of work involved in properly preparing meat. This reasoning was later replaced by the fact that our sources for food in the United States is not safe. E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria and more are COMMON amongst meat and eggs. The CDC estimates that each year roughly 1 in 6 Americans (or 48 million people) gets sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases. I also believe that eating a vegetable rich diet allows one to skirt most, if not all, of these maladies. While there have been outbreaks of food bourne illnesses amongst cantalope and spinach, it is the exception, not the rule. Millions of Americans each day eat raw vegetables. Can the same security really be said with eating raw meat?


Anyway, I was reading all these recipes that called for ingredients I had never heard before. "Oh great," I thought. "Now I have to track down a health foods store, track down my stuff, and may an obnoxious price for it probably." Then I had the idea to just google on how to make seitan. I dabbled with making my first batch and it's marvelous! I feel so independent and liberated from Boca burgers/crumbles. Seitan is commonly called wheat meat or mock duck. It is made from wheat gluten. Here is an absolute gem of a recipe on how to make it. 


Tonight I made a taco dinner using homemade seitan tacos with guacamole! Here is the guacamole recipe I used in case you were interested. In the recipe I substituted red pepper flakes instead of the cayenne. It gave it a much more pungent flavor. It was awesome!

My guac and pan fried seitan! The seitan doesn't look that perfect because it was the first batch I ever made: user error. 

The coolest thing about seitan is that you can freeze it! Make up a large batch, divide the "meat" up into freezer bags and toss them in your freezer. You are good to go for a month. I highly recommend everyone, even non-vegetarians, giving seitan a go. I can imagine it in soups, stews, skewered on the grill, and more.