I’ve never cooked seitan from scratch before, but I quite like it and it’s certainly a good alternative to tofu. In Finland, seitan is not very readily available, although several specialist stores do stock many tasty products from Wheaty. They are rather expensive though. Fortunately, making seitan yourself is very easy, and it turns out to be ridiculously cheap: you can order gluten flour online from several places, or you can get it by weight from Punnitse & Säästä (i.e. Weigh & Save). I bought 500g online for a few euros, and decided to cook it all in one go — this turned out to be slight mistake, since the batch was huge! You can find gram flour from Indian stores, where it costs next to nothing. The recipe below is adapted from the one at Chocochili (in Finnish). I’ve halved the quantities, since I actually had to boil the seitan in two batches myself. Unless you’ve got a huge pot and a lot of freezer space (or eaters!), I wouldn’t advise making much more than this at a time.

Chopping Up the Seitan Dough

Ingredients:
Seitan Dough:
250g Gluten Flour
125g Gram Flour (i.e. Chickpea Flour)
2 Teaspoons of Chipotle
2 Teaspoons of Soy Sauce
2dl Water

Boiling Water:
1,5l of water
2 Vegetable Stock Cubes
0,25dl Soy Sauce
0,25dl Balsamic Vinegar

You could use any kind of spices here, the only limit is your imagination!

Boiling the Seitan

Cooking:
Time required: ~50min
-Mix the dry ingredients in a big bowl.
-Add the soy sauce and the water, mix together with the help of a fork or something.
-The dough starts to develop very quickly, work at it with your hands a little bit to mix everything together.
-Take the dough out to a cutting board or similar and form into a long block.
-Cut the dough into thin slices with a knife.
-Shape the slices according to your preferences — I made one batch into balls and one into small chunks. Note that the chunks quadruple in size when you boil them! The ones you see in the picture above are much too big, I cut each of them into three or four smaller chunks.
-Prepare the boiling water.
-When the water is (almost) boiling, start adding the seitan pieces one by one.
-Boil for about 30min, discard the water, and the seitan is ready to use!

You could now fry the seitan on a pan or add it to soups or other dishes, but you can also marinate it further by making a spice mixture of your own or using some ready-made mixtures. I marinated one batch right away with some curry paste. Marinate the seitan for at least a few hours or preferably overnight in the fridge. You can freeze the seitan, say, in portions, to be used in future cooking. Stay tuned for a seitan curry recipe — I made some with my seitan! Keep in mind that the gluten flour turns into cement when left to dry, so you better do the washing up soon afterwards…