This is my standard, versatile fake meat. It is almost exactly the same as this recipe for seitan pastrami but quadrupled and tweaked slightly.

It makes 4 big sausages that you can freeze and use over a few months. It’s great in pasta sauce, fried up as taco meat, sliced and spread on a pizza like pepperoni, or diced and tossed in a salad.   32-40 servings

Preheat oven to 325 degrees

Ingredients

    • 6 cups instant gluten flour (vital wheat gluten) (order in bulk online)
    • 1 cup nutritional yeast flakes
    • 1 cup garbanzo flour (this is optional – you could also use whole wheat flour, soy flour or any other random flour you want to use up)
    • 2 Tablespoons + 2 teaspoons paprika (or if that’s too complicated, just use your 1/4 cup and fill it 2/3 of the way.)
    • 1 Tablespoon salt
    • 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
    • 1 teaspoon ground cumin
    • 1 teaspoon ground mustard (a squirt of wet mustard works fine too, but in that case add with wet
    • ingredients)
    • 2 teaspoons ground black pepper
    • 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
    • 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
    • 2 1/2 cups cold water
    • 1 cup tomato paste (if you don’t have it you can sub ketchup for a sweeter sausage)
    • 1/2 cup soy sauce
    • 1 cup olive oil (or any flavorless oil, such as canola)
    • 12 cloves garlic, pressed (if this sounds like a pain, just toss in 2 T of garlic powder but add with dry ingredients)

Mix the dry ingredients (flours, yeast flakes and spices) with a fork in a large mixing bowl. Stir the liquid ingredients together in a medium mixing bowl. Pour theliquid into the dry ingredients, and mix them thoroughly. You will have to get in there with your bare hands and knead. If there is still flour around the edges, addwater a few tablespoons at a time until you have one big gluey dough ball.

Knead the gluten directly in the mixing bowl for about a minute. Pull it apart into 4 chunks (you can use a scale to make them of even weight.) Form the gluten into four sausages, each about 8 inches long. Cut 4 pieces of parchment paper and 4 pieces of foil, and wrap each sausage tightly in parchment paper then foil the ends and place the sausage seam side down onto a dry cookie sheet. Nestle all 4 sausages so they are touching on the sheet and put in the oven.

Bake the sausage for 1 1/2 hours at 325. When done, unwrap the seitan, transfer it to a cooling rack, and let it cool thoroughly. When completely cool, wrap the seitan tightly in plastic wrap and store in the freezer (for a few months) or the fridge (for a week or so). I like to keep one in the fridge and the rest in the freezer and I thaw them out as needed.