img

Hail, Seitan: The Transformative Magic of Gluten

Here at ChefSteps, we love gluten. We love it in pizza crusts, we love it in panettone, we love it in pie dough. Without gluten, we’d be bereft. Wheat proteins are literally responsible for a lot of what we love about breads and pastry—their chewiness, their springiness, their lightness, and their heaviness.If you love gluten—and you do—then you’ll love seitan. So what is seitan? Seitan is pure gluten protein, made by washing a wheat flour dough in changes of water to remove all of its starch. This dough is a blank canvas for flavor and texture that you can play around with to achieve a wide range of “wheat meat” results, and that's just scratching the surface of its potential. The ChefSteps seitan class will help you unlock the unlimited culinary potential of this plant-based protein with innovative recipes, technique guides, science deep dives, and much, much more.




img

Play With Your Food

Seitan is a textural marvel. You can manipulate it—fold it, knead it, blend it, roll it, braid it, surf it, scroll it, pause it, click it, cross it, crack it, switch, update it—to produce a stunning array of textures, ranging from silky salumi to tender braises, and everything in between.





Wheat Meat Winners

Seitan is a blank canvas. Use it to create your own masterpiece of flavor and texture—or re-create meaty favorites, without the meat: hot dogs, hams, nuggets, ribs.

img




img

Dough-to-Tail Cooking: Put Wheat Starch to Work

You make seitan by painstakingly rinsing away all the starch in a flour dough, but you don’t have to let that wheat starch go to waste! It’s a versatile and fascinating ingredient in its own right. Our class explores the science of starch and shows off the culinary potential of this seitan byproduct with recipes for “cold skin” líangpí noodles and a starch slurry–thickened stir-fry.
Whole wheat utilization, baby!





Seitan Science!

What is gluten? What’s the difference between glutenin and gliadin? How does starch gelatinization work? How do you turn a puddle of blended gluten into a rack of ribs? Our class dives deep into the science of seitan, so you can better understand the whys behind the hows. Actionable guides give you the tools and know-how to branch out and begin experimenting with seitanic creations of your own!

img




img

Gear Up for Gluten

If you want to fully take advantage of seitan’s potential, it helps to have the right equipment.

With a few versatile tools (don’t worry, we’re not pushing any seitanic unitaskers here) and some creativity with cardboard and foil, you’ll be able to manipulate and cook seitan, so it takes on a range of different textures, flavors, and forms.