Homemade vegan beef: a recipe and a screed
"Reconsider your fun."
For the first time since this newsletter’s inception in 2022, I drew up something of an “editorial calendar” for the whole year back in February, and now find myself veering off of it completely to give you my recipe for fake beef. Why?
It’s still cold and snowy where I am, so I thought people might enjoy some ideas for cozy stews.
A few weeks ago,
posted a most glorious polemic on beef, with this paragraph being my favourite:
But eating beef without care for its effects on the environment in the U.S. in 2025 is functionally climate denialism. Reality is and has been quite clear: Affluent people in the U.S. need to cut back on meat and dairy because they’re bad for the planet, the animals, and the workers. If this cuts into your fun times, reconsider your fun.
Reconsider your fun! I love that a lot because, a) it’s real and forthright in a way that I aspire to be, and b) it reminded me that this was exactly what I had to do when I ethically wanted to be vegan, but didn’t want to leave fun behind.
As a child of German immigrants, I had a lot of fun eating a pretty meat-heavy cuisine when I was a kid. My mom is a great cook, and I could not have imagined my life without meat. It’s delicious! A taste and texture extravaganza! Juiciness, chewiness, savouriness, all in one! Where else are you gonna get that?? One day when I was about ten, my dad came home from work and reported that his team had gone for lunch to celebrate a colleague’s retirement. “He chose one of these Chinese vegetarian places, and what I had was pretty good actually,” I remember him saying of the stir-fried vegetables with cashews he’d ordered. “But they had all these dishes with mock-meats made of wheat gluten!” His tone was awash in contempt by that point, and I felt it, too. “It looked disgusting! If you want to eat meat, just eat meat!”
I wholly internalized this belief, and for many years was low-key anti-vegetarian simply because “meat tastes good.” This stubborn stance was slowly eroded throughout my teens and early twenties as friend after friend went vegetarian and forced me to reckon with why. When I finally, truly looked at the thing — imprisoning and killing animals to eat them — I could not look away. Still, it took me a long time to fully quit eating meat. By the time I was in grad school, living completely alone for the first time, I forced myself to cook through several vegetarian cookbooks and set myself a five year plan to get good enough at veggie cooking to finally take the plunge.
Then, when I was twenty-five, I met David — the love of my life and a vegan since the age of sixteen. To be clear, he never once asked me to change, but being with him fast-tracked my plans in a few ways. First, his strong convictions inspired me; it was cool to be with someone who really gave a shit. Second, I wanted to impress him with my cooking, so my vegan game levelled up. Third, early in our courtship David took me to Bo De Duyen, a Chinese Buddhist vegetarian restaurant in Toronto’s Chinatown (sadly long gone) where they served...drumroll…a ton of mock meats made from wheat gluten! And it was fucking lit! My dad had been wrong! This stuff was chewy, juicy, and savoury all at once! If you didn’t want to eat meat, why would you not eat this? (Save for those who can’t have gluten, I’m so sorry!)
As I’ve noted elsewhere, Bo De showed me what was possible with fake meat, but it wasn’t until I joined the Seitan Appreciation Society on Facebook (which I wrote about here) that I was able to move past the rather spongy outputs of my early wheat gluten experiments, and into pretty delectable homemade fake meats of my own.
What do you mean “wheat gluten”? What is “seitan”?
In case you’re not familiar, allow me to quote myself at length:
In much of the English-speaking world, seitan refers to a meat substitute made from gluten, the protein component of wheat. It can be made two ways: with vital wheat gluten, a powdered form of already-isolated protein; or by kneading a ball of dough underwater to wash the starch away. The latter takes longer, but it’s thrilling to watch the stretchy, protein-blob emerge, then cook it into fibrous “meat.”…
Seitan is nothing new… nor is it a “weird white vegan thing.” Of her Singaporean Chinese heritage, [Seitan] Society member Jaki Teo wrote on Instagram: “Mock meat is so common in our dietary culture that nobody gives a single f. Vegans eat it, non-vegans eat it, and we even offer it to dead people at their graves.”…
Indeed, gluten-based faux sausage and eel recipes appear in Chinese texts as early as 1301. In America, the 1930s gluten experiments of the Seventh-day Adventists birthed, among other curiosities, canned veggie hotdogs. A jerky-like product dubbed seitan was brought to America from Japan in the late 1960s by macrobiotics founder George Ohsawa, and the word evolved to refer to all gluten products in English. Western seitan recipes have become increasingly complex, but until I joined The Society I had no idea I could come close to the deliciousness I’d tasted at Buddhist vegetarian restaurants in my own kitchen.
Taking seitan seriously
To this day, though, seitan doesn’t seem to be taken seriously by the world of professional recipe developers, chefs, and food media in the West. Of course there are loads of genius seitan recipes all over the vegan internet and in veg-focused cookbooks. I learned to wash flour from Peter Berley’s Modern Vegetarian Kitchen, and how to use vital wheat gluten from Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero (the former’s latest book is, in fact, devoted to and titled Fake Meat).
But in mainstream, omnivore cooking media, I haven’t seen much. There are a handful of seitan recipes by Cathy Erway up at Taste, and Eater published this slide show of Chef Aaron Adams making seitan sausage in 2012. But at the time of this writing, a search on Bon Appetit yields nothing, while NYT Cooking’s vast archive features a whopping two seitan recipes published in 2010 and 2011 respectively.
I got way too excited when The Big Brunch competitor, Chef Roman Wilcox, made seitan for the judges (Dan Levy, Will Guidara, and Sohla El-Waylly) in 2022. Guess what? They loved it! I thought for sure this would inspire a new era, we’d see “Sohla Does Seitan” on the NYT Cooking YouTube, suddenly all the cool recipe developers would be doing it, there’d be dozens of innovative new recipes for me to try. Guess what? I’m still waiting!
As far as restaurants go, you can find wheat gluten on the menu at New York’s popular, otherwise meat-heavy Xi’an Famous Foods as a component of its Liang Pi — an ingenious traditional dish that employs washing flour to separate the starch and protein; making bouncy noodles with the starch; and steaming the protein into seitan that’s intentionally spongy so it soaks up the sauce. As noted above, eating wheat gluten as a protein source is a bog standard practice in many parts of China, Singapore, and Taiwan (the gluten episode of Netflix’s Flavourful Origins is my number one comfort watch, you’re welcome). As such, I’m sure there are many other delicious East Asian restaurants throughout North America that feature seitan and its brethren on their menu.
But gluten employed to make analogues of specific meat, especially used in a non-Asian context, seems to remain relegated to exclusively vegan and vegetarian restaurants. The one exception I know of (that maybe proves the rule?) is Cleveland’s Larder, where Chef Jeremy Umansky offers, alongside all manner of meat, an occasional seitan special (he specifically made seitan bologna once, but I can’t find the post). Other than that, I haven’t heard of any other buzzy omni restaurant that offers house-made faux chicken, say, or seitan bourguignon. Have you?? Serious question!
In the vegan restaurant scene, Toronto, where I live, is having a mini seitan moment thanks to the delicious deli meats made by Nonno’s Vegan Butcher in Hamilton. Both Stefano’s and Bad Attitude Bread are using these cold cuts to make killer gourmet sandwiches and I couldn’t be happier about it.
But neither Pietramala nor Superiority Burger, arguably North America’s reigning vegan and vegetarian restaurants respectively, fuck with seitan. When I reached out to the former’s chef, Ian Graye, he told me:
I like seitan. I just think it got too ubiquitous overall and especially in Philly it was everywhere…ten to fifteen years ago, everywhere I’d look would be seitan steaks or tofu steaks, so I rejected that when I was figuring out my style and it’s just stuck with me. The focus is on vegetables.
That is, of course, fair enough — the things Graye does with vegetables inspire me daily. Still, I couldn’t help but share with Graye my fantasy that he would employ his incredible mold-based fermentation know-how to one day make truly elevated seitan charcuterie. (I did try to make some myself once, but was low-key afraid to eat it; would prefer to buy from a seasoned pro). Will my dream come true?? 👀
Superiority Burger’s Brooks Headley likes seitan, too, it would seem, but comes out pretty actively against it in several interviews: “With the Superiority Burger,” he told The Believer in 2020, “there’s no seitan, wheat gluten, or texturized soy protein, none of the stuff usually associated with veggie burgers. It doesn’t flake apart like an actual burger does. I wanted it to be recognizable as food.”
To be clear, I ate one of the best meals of my life at Superiority Burger, I have Headley’s cookbooks, I think he’s hilarious, both as a writer and culinarily. I very much respect what he does. But that particular sentiment gets under my skin. Seitan is food! It’s a real thing that has been eaten as a cost-effective, accessible protein source for centuries. Figuring out how to separate wheat’s starch from its protein is no less genius or real than figuring out how to curdle soy milk and press it into tofu, or skim said milk’s top layer off when boiling to make yuba (of which Headley is a huge fan).1
Yes, commercially-made vital wheat gluten — the pre-separated, powdered protein that makes for easy seitan-making is industrially processed, and can result in off-flavours if the batch you buy is stale (or your recipe doesn’t have enough flavour of its own). But it’s still not some ultra-processed frankenfood (I confirmed with Bob’s Red Mill over email that they grind wheat berries and wash the flour, resulting in a “stretchy mass which goes through a circulating furnace to dry it and then it is re-milled back to powder form and then packaged.” No chemical craziness!).
Still, I think that this idea that seitan is “fake” is part of why it’s not as popular as the other vegan proteins. The demonization of gluten over the last decade certainly hasn’t helped. Headley says, in his review of 2015 punk vegan cookbook, Soy Not Oi! 2:
My only beef are the seitan recipes that are peppered throughout. Seitan kind of trashes your stomach. I don’t recommend eating it that often, or ever really. But that’s fine, because there’re scads of other great recipes in this volume, so that’s cool…And shit, well, seitan is kind of like smoking cigarettes. Some folks are into it even though they know the health risks. So, fine, go ahead make some seitan, I won’t judge.
Health risks? A comparison to cigarettes?? This is wheat protein we’re talking about here! I’m very sorry for Headley that seitan trashes his stomach. I know that gluten is tough for some folks to digest. Seitan can be a bit of a heavy food. But so can steak or some of the other meat-heavy dishes it’s often used to mimic. To, as usual, quote
, this time from the entire chapter devoted to gluten in her fabulous The Vegan Chinese Kitchen, “gluten is an excellent source of lean protein, low in saturated fat and carbohydrates, and a single modest serving…contains 45% of the recommended daily value of iron.” Just like cigs, amiright?Again, I love what Headley does, I love a yuba sandwich, of course he doesn’t have to use seitan if it’s not for him, nor do you! But to me it’s a bummer that so many omnivores who happily eat tofu and tempeh are hostile toward seitan. It’s easy to make, not wildly expensive, likely healthier than anything Beyond is pumping out, and might sometimes satisfy your craving for the beef you just can’t quit. So when I see seitan maligned in that way, it makes me sad.
But why fake meat?
You may ask why not just eat a beefy stew made with mushrooms or beans. And of course that’s fine if that’s what you like. That’s what Alicia Kennedy herself prefers, as she detailed here in 2023. She writes, “I don’t know who wants a vital-wheat-gluten-veal parmesan when eggplant exists; at the same time, I don’t fault anyone who does.” And I appreciate that sentiment, because it’s me who wants it! Of course I love beans and eggplants and mushrooms, but I do want the vital-wheat-gluten-veal sometimes. Both to meet my protein needs (not to enter the protein wars, but like, we do need it), and because I think it’s delicious.
A lot of omni critics and some vegan ones, too, are like “Why do you have to make it look like meat?” I find this a somewhat annoying, but in some ways reasonable question. Quoting her Buddhist vegetarian friend in her excellent book, Asian Tofu,
writes, “‘In Taiwan, the reason why people try to make vegetarian dishes taste like meat is because they want to draw nonvegetarians’ attention to it.” I guess that’s partly what I’m trying to do here? Some vegans don’t like it, though, because it perpetuates the idea of meat as food. I understand that sentiment. For me, though, making meat out of wheat feels like a good joke; an enjoyable, low-key fuck you. When I’m really going for it — making “chicken skin” with rice paper and so forth — it also feels like a fun artistic challenge, and like paying homage to the Buddhist artisans before me. If you’re anything like me, the act of making seitan could be a great way to “reconsider your fun” if that’s something you’re toying with right now. To be clear, shaping and flavouring your gluten like meat has just as much history and validity as “plain” seitan. One is not more “authentic” than the other.
Finally, I’d just like to point out that when a mainstream chef makes a fruit out of meat, people lose their damn minds, so…I’m just gonna let myself have this. Try it! Hail seitan! Reconsider your fun!
Homemade Vegan Beef
Okay, the screed part got so long, I’m putting the recipe itself in a separate post. I hope you click! I hope you make it! I hope you tell me all about it! And if you would never, tell me why not! I’m very interested in this, forever and always! Thank you! Good-bye!
If this was a properly reported piece for a publication, I’d have reached out to Headley for further comment, but it isn’t and I don’t have an easy way to contact Headley, and I wanted to get this out before the weather turns warm, so I’m sorry for the imbalanced reporting!
This was fun and I learned a bunch! It does seem like the criticisms of seitan that you mentioned come from a whitewashed disregard of the use of it in East Asian cultures.
This so great! Lots of things about seitan I didn't know, which make me like it more! Baffles me when people think it's 'weird processed vegan meat' when they're literally eating flesh and skin at best. All the USP hype did us dirty.