Vine and Dine – Panko-Crusted Seitan Milanese

I hadn’t had Candle 79 long when Tami suggested using it for Vine and Dine, so I jumped at the idea. After all, one of the ideas behind Vine and Dine is to get more use from our cookbooks as well as learn more about wine matching. I hadn’t made anything at all so it was quite easy to pick dishes to try.

First up was the Panko-Crusted Seitan Milanese. I used home made chickeny seitan I already had in the freezer rather than the version in the book, but otherwise I followed the recipe exactly. The seitan needs to marinade for at least 4 hours, so it does need some planning, but other than that it was extremely easy.

You can’t really tell from the photo but I served it alongside some tagliatelle which I tossed with the leftover marinade and some extra basil and parsley.

We both enjoyed this dish a lot and the results were definitely more impressive than the amount of time and effort I put into it. An excellent first effort with this book.

But now it’s confession time. We did have a very nice bottle of wine with this, but the empty bottle got put into the recycling bin by mistake and neither of us can remember what it was. It was certainly a light Italian red, and was probably bought from the Tanners vegan list but we can’t be any more definite than that. Great shame, because it did go very well with the dish. The book does have suggested wine pairings, which is great to see. They suggest a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc for this, but we ignored their advice. It would have been interesting to try both wines with the dish to compare – I can’t wait to see whether others were more obedient than us!

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