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

2 to 3 servings; about 500 g noodles (plus 100 g test batch of noodles)

Making seitan from scratch requires rinsing away all the starch in a kneaded wheat dough, which gives you a hunk of pure wheat protein and a bunch of starchy water. You can toss that starchy water, if you want, but you can also use it to make deliciously snappy and chewy noodles. Called liángpí in Mandarin, which translates roughly to “cold skin,” these noodles are basically a starch gel that’s cooled so the starches retrograde, forming a dense and highly organized network of starch molecules. Once set, this network is extremely resilient, which means you can toss the noodles in a sauce, throw them in a soup, or even use them in a stir-fry, and they’ll maintain their noodle integrity. They have very little inherent flavor to speak of, so just like seitan, they can serve as slippery and very-pleasing-to-eat vehicles for flavorful sauce.To make the noodles, getting the right starch concentration in the wheat starch slurry leftover from making seitan is straightforward but also a little tricky. Let the slurry settle (about six hours at room temperature) and ladle off the top layer of clear water. Once the ladle starts to fill up with a milky suspension of starch, rather than clear water, you can stop; the ratio of starch to water at that point will be high enough that you can make starch noodles.After you make one noodle sheet, you can start dialing in the texture of the noodles by adding water to the noodle batter to make the noodles softer. I suggest adding water in increments of 10 percent of the batter’s weight, then making a test batch after each addition. Don’t add any more than 50 percent of the batter’s weight in water, though; you risk diluting it too much.Of course, the more test batches you do, the fewer noodles this process will yield. Rather than viewing this as a limitation on the process, we like to think of it as a reason to make more than one batch of seitan at a time!

Liángpí (Wheat Starch Noodles)