I’ve started experimenting with vegan cooking in earnest recently and thought it would be a good idea to write about my experiments and what I learn. Primarily because I’m sure I’ll forget, but also because someone might end up reading this one day? (Who knows.)

Anyway, as I’ve been mentioning randomly in my mealplanner devlogs, I have been making old Plated recipes and replacing (some) ingredients with vegan replacements. Primarily chicken with seitan designed to have a similar or complementary flavor.

And at this point, through trying different cooking methods and herb mix recipes, I have something that works REALLY well.

A summary of what I learned

This chicken-y spice mix works incredibly well: https://healthiersteps.com/recipe/chicken-style-seasoning/, better than “Better Than Bouillon’s No Chicken Base”.
Simmering seitan in broth with the same flavoring works much better than just steaming it.
Seitan is really simple to make (if you have a food processor). The recipe I use: mix 1/2 15 oz can of chickpeas, 2 tbsp flavoring (so the chicken style seasoning above), 1/2 cup water, 1 tsp of oil & 1 cup of vital wheat gluten in a food processor until it becomes doughy, knead a couple times, divide into three chunks, then simmer as described above for 30-60 mins. (save the broth) Note: each seitan chunk ends up w/ about 35g of protein, which is way better than tofu.
If pan frying or cooking later with a method that dries food out, using the broth while cooking helps the seitan stay moist. I found spooning over a couple spoonfools after pan searing for a minute on each side worked well.
Adding a bit of oil to seitan before making the dough seems to makes it taste a bit better.

For a chicken-y taste, I found this spice mix recipe: https://healthiersteps.com/recipe/chicken-style-seasoning/. It requires quite a few separate spices, but it’s honestly incredible how good of a replacement it is.

Originally I tried using Better than Bouillon’s No Chicken soup base, and it kind of worked, but not nearly as well.

As for making seitan, I went with a recipe that uses vital wheat gluten and chickpeas, then modified it a bit. The recipe itself was simple: mix 1/2 15 oz can of chickpeas, 2 tbsp flavoring (so the chicken style seasoning above), 1/2 cup water, 1 tsp of oil & 1 cup of vital wheat gluten in a food processor until it becomes doughy, knead a couple times, divide into three chunks, then steam for an hour wrapped in parchment paper or foil.

I found, however, that steaming was not the ideal cooking method (for me at least). For some reason, even wrapped, the seitan would plump, which made it hard to pan fry later. I tried one other method which works much better for me, which is simmering the seitan in flavored broth (using the same flavoring from the seitan).

This helped infuse the seitan with even more flavor, and for some reason, the seitan remained flat after being cooked. The broth is also super useful later if using cooking methods that tend to dry food out (like searing).

The last thing I tried is adding MSG to the seitan, but… I have no idea if it actually improved anything.

What I want to try next

There are a couple more experiments w/ seitan I want to try:

MSG again, see if I can tell if it does anything.
trying to knead less to see if it makes the texture less spongey (I’ve tried to reduce this as much as possible, without it becoming overly chewey, but I haven’t gotten it right).

But mostly I want to start trying to replace dairy products that don’t have good in-store replacements.