Beer battered chicken seitan

This is another Yellow Rose recipe that came right at the end of the week and didn’t make it into the last post. I’ve talked about making seitan before and although I’ve made seitan sausages that worked really well I’ve not had much success with seitan steaks. I really wanted a version that made nice smooth steaks that I could use in a variety of recipes. I can buy seitan in tins at the chinese shop but I find they leave a bit of a strange aftertaste. I can also get good smoked seitan but you don’t always want a smoky flavour to what you’re cooking.

When I saw this version on Joanna’s blog I decided to try again. Well, this was my best effort so far but still by no means perfect. It made an absolute tonne of seitan but it was still very spongy. I know that different brands of wheat gluten work differently and I suspect that I will never get a good smooth steak using this brand (the only brand I think you can get in the UK).

Still, I wasn’t going to let a bit of sponginess get in the way of fried beer batter so I pressed on with the recipe regardless. If there’s anything better than frying something, it’s frying it twice, so I was always going to love this recipe. You could really taste the beer in the batter, unlike other beer batters I’ve tried. That may not be to everyone’s taste but as we both love beer and we both love oil, it worked really well for us! The sponginess of the seitan was still noticeable but it didn’t ruin the dish at all. I can only imagine how great it would be with lovely smooth seitan!

I’ve still got loads of seitan left so I’ll be looking for other ways to try it, and I’ll let you know how they go. Incidentally just in case frying the seitan twice wasn’t enough, I served it with chips and a nice homemade spicy tomato sauce.

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