Seitan satay skewers with peanut coconut sauce

I did say that I’d be making more recipes from Artful Vegan and here’s another. This is in the appetizer section but I was eating alone so I decided to just eat more of it than the recipe suggested and eat it as a main course. It appears to be quite a bit simpler than some of the recipes – but there a couple of mistakes in the instructions which made it not as easy as it appeared!

The instructions missed out a couple of the ingredients mentioned in the recipe list. I’d already struggled with the seitan not having enough liquid and added some extra water before I spotted the tamari in the ingredient list and assume that was meant to go in. I have to buy my vital wheat gluten online so I was reluctant to start again, so I just added a splash of tamari and kneaded it in. I think that made it a bit tough, so if you are making it be sure to add the tamari in along with the water.

The other problem was that there are 12 cups of stock mentioned in the ingredients list which don’t get used, but it was easy to see that that should have been added to the coconut broth to cook the seitan nuggets.

After that things went pretty smoothly. My sauce was a lot thinner than double cream consistency, but I went with it (and after refrigerating the leftovers, it really thickened up, so I’d make it in advance next time). I used a bag of preshredded stir fry mix for the salad part, as I can never get through a bag of bean sprouts before they turn to liquid.

I put 3 pieces of each of the seitan, mint and pineapple on the skewers because I was eating it as a main course. This might have overcrowded the pan a bit because I’d have preferred more of the seitan to come into contact with the grill pan. In fact after I’d taken the picture I gave the seitan nuggets a few extra minutes on the grill to get more nice smoky grill marks.

So, how was the overall dish, after all the tweaking? Delicious. The seitan chunks were astonishingly meaty and went brilliantly with the pinepple and mint. The salad was lovely and fresh and the sauce was rich, peanuty, spicy and zingy. I don’t think I ground the szechuan peppercorns finely enough because I bit down on a few little rock hard things, so next time I’d spend a bit longer grinding them before adding to the sauce. But otherwise, now that I’ve ironed out a few of the difficulties, I’d certainly make the dish again.