In League With Seitan

If you're vegan or vegetarian you will probably have come across seitan. It's made of wheat gluten and common in China and Korea. If it's made properly it has a similar texture to chicken and takes sauces and marinades incredibly well. It can also be breaded and deep fried as an alternative to nuggets or even burgers. It's been quite hard to find as an ingredient in the UK, and tends to be found in Oriental supermarkets rather than mainstream ones.

I was interested to see that London based vegan fast food business Temple of Seitan had collaborated with Yorkshire tofu maker Tofoo to make the seitan they use in shops avail\ble in supermarkets. Except... they haven't.

I picked up a box in Sainsbury's as it was on offer, and I got around to using it yesterday. The fine print is that it's tofu with 22% seitan and chicken flavour. Now, I like Tofoo's tofu as it's very firm so great to cook with out of the box without pressing, and I assume the Temple actually do use something that's mostly wheat gluten, but I'm not sure what this is. It unpacks as a small grey sausage which doesn't look particularly attractive, and I was at a loss as to how to actually use it. It's too small to cut into katsu fillets, which would be an obvious use for it, however, I had some katsu sauce (well, Chinese curry sauce) so decided to press on, and, as suggested on the packaging, tore it up and browned it a bit and mixed it with the sauce and some veg. It tastes fine and works like that, but didn't match my vision of making a katsu fillet, or indeed something like the smashing looking battered goodness on the Temple's website.

In all, it's Tofoo doing what they know and putting the Temple's name on it. It's a bit stretchier and more tearable than tofu (or Tofoo) and would probably work really well for pulling for pulled 'pork' type of things, but that's not really what I was looking for.

Having decided after nearly 40 years of being vegetarian to go fully vegan this year, we have been looking for alternatives to some of our staples, not least a Quorn roast for Christmas (they have egg in). We've since found that Asda are doing a vegan chicken style roll with stuffing, but in the spirit of DIY, I'm going to have a go at making a seitan roll myself. Apart from sourcing the wheat gluten (slightly harder than going to the supermarket), it's pretty easy stuff to make, easier than tofu for example, so I've had a couple of goes with variable results, and will report further.