Seitan Class

Matthew Woolen is a master pastry chef and has worked in a variety of Seattle restaurants, including gastropub Old Sage, Zhu Dang, and a gluten-free restaurant called Capitol Cider.

Matthew Woolen

Seitan is a meat substitute popular in East Asian cuisines that is made by washing a wheat flour dough in changes of water to remove starch, leaving behind a dough of pure gluten protein. 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.Make <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/recipes/plant-based-hot-dogs">vegan hot dogs</a> by blending the dough with spices, liquid smoke, and vinegar. Or try your hand at some <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/recipes/wheat-meat-pro-shoo-t">faux-sciutto</a>, which incorporates umami-rich ingredients like miso, nutritional yeast, and MSG to mimic the savory depth of cured salumi. Seeing as seitan is essentially pure gluten, it’s important to use a high-protein flour to make the dough. Bread flour, which has a protein content in the 12 to 14 percent range, has much higher “gluten potential” compared with a low-protein flour such as pastry flour. High-protein flour is critical to giving seitan its chew, and it also gives the best yield after all of the starch has been washed away from the dough.Making seitan from scratch is pretty simple—it mainly just requires a little elbow grease and some patience. But the end result will be both tender and chewy, rivaling the texture of real meat, making it the perfect foundation for countless plant-based meat recipes.

How to Make Seitan