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 ham! “Seit-ham”? Nah. “Sei-ham”? Um … what about, “Heim”? Yuck. Okay, whatever! Seitan ham!<a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/homemade-honey-glazed-ham">Glazed ham</a> is a traditional centerpiece for big holiday meals, and this recipe for a mock ham made from seitan is for anyone who’s gone plant-based but still has a nostalgic yearning for classic preparations they used to eat before they went vegan. It’s got all the hallmarks of a glazed ham: a sweet, sticky, and burnished glaze encasing a salty and savory interior that has a texture reminiscent of cured and cooked meat.Of course, there are some caveats. <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/seitan">Seitan</a> is a great meat protein replacement, but it’s never going to be meat. We can make it resemble ham in texture, and we can make it look and taste fantastic, but no one will ever confuse it for ham. But with a little attention to detail, we can get it pretty close.Since appearance is important, getting the seitan to take on a rosy hue similar to meat cured with sodium nitrite was pretty important, too. And easily done: Just like in my <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/wheat-meat-pro-shoo-t">Faux-sciutto</a>, replacing some of the water in the seitan with beet juice yields a meat-like coloring. This is entirely optional (and I like the contrast of the burnished crust and the blond interior of an uncolored seitan), but if you do choose to do it, it helps to add ascorbic acid, as that will preserve the vibrancy of the red color even after prolonged cooking.Seasoning the seitan is also pretty easy to do: Blend it up with umami-rich ingredients like miso and tomato paste to make it taste savory and salty and a little sweet, just like a ham.
Nailing the texture was slightly more difficult and time-consuming. Seitan by itself is chewy and a little rubbery, since it’s basically pure gluten, and gluten isn’t water soluble. Think of a piece of good, chewy bread: All the chew is from the gluten being sheared by your teeth into itty-bitty pieces, all the soft silkiness is from the starch gel that makes up a lot of the crumb. Seitan doesn’t have any of that silky softness … unless you add it in. Oil helps things along by giving the seitan richness, but the real key to altering the texture is incorporating starchy chickpea flour. Not a lot, since ham has a texture that is also kind of chewy; just enough to mimic the mouthfeel of gelatin and fat in a cooked leg of pork.For the glaze, I ended up doing many, many trials, using a number of over-complicated recipes. I tried several gastriques, or vinegar reductions, as well as iterations on those gastriques. But when I tried a simple glaze of pineapple juice, brown sugar, and maple syrup, it had just the right acidity and sweetness. And as long as you keep the glaze from over-reducing and reaching temperatures past the thread stage ([f 223]–[f 235]), it’ll have the perfect consistency for brushing on layer after layer to get a sticky, hammy glaze.By far the most interesting part of this recipe to me is the shaping of the ham and cooking it so it retains that shape. I tried roasting the seitan to approximate the way you’d roast a ham, but it just didn’t work. Steaming yielded much better and more consistent results, and steaming also opened up the possibilities for shaping it. As long as your mold fits into a steamer, you’re all set. For this recipe, I chose to go with a triangular shape—well, the shape of those canned hams you can buy at the store—using a mold made from a strip of cardboard wrapped in aluminum foil, but I’ve got a little tip below for experimenting with other shapes.

Glazed Seitan Ham