Hello everyone,
Today I thought I would review a perfect vegan game day appetizer recipe that I tried yesterday – Seitan Bufflalo “Wings” from Baked-In. I will admit up front, I made a few errors when making this. Read my review and learn from my mistakes! That being said, I still think this is a great recipe, and it was my first time making seitan. Out of all of the faux meats out there, I think seitan is the most difficult to make at home and get it right. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible! So roll up your sleeves and give it try!
Seitan Bufflalo “Wings” from Baked-In
The first step is to prepare your breading mixture. It’s pretty simple. Put some soy milk in a bowl with 1 tsp apple cider vinegar and let it curdle. In a separate bowl, combine panko bread crumbs, flour, smoked paprika, salt, and cayenne pepper.
Then you make your sauce and prep your onions (the recipe also calls for mushrooms, but I opted to leave those out). The sauce is a basic mixture of hot sauce, margarine, vinegar, garlic powder, and salt. Put everything in a small sauce pan and stir until combined. Once that’s done, turn off the heat, and set it aside. While the sauce was warming up, I opted to sauté the onions.
Now comes the really fun part – making the seitan wings. The recipe called for a food processor, but I used my Vitamix to make the ‘dough.’ Looking back, I probably should have used the food processor. Ah well, hindsight is 20/20, right? Place the sautéed onions and 1-2 cloves of garlic in the processor. Once finely chopped, add the sage, parsley, thyme, salt, pepper, and water. This should quickly turn into a smooth paste. Then you slowly add in the vital wheat gluten and pulse until ‘doughy.’
My ‘doughy’ substance was really sticky and a little hard to work with. You’re supposed to be able to roll it into a 16″ long cylinder. My dough kept wanting to revert back to its original shape. It took some time, but I finally was able to get a cylinder, though a little uneven. From here, you cut it into 1″ pieces. Now, mine were a variety of sizes because my dough cylinder wasn’t even. I encourage you to really try to get a nice even cylinder so the pieces come out right. If they are too big, they inflate while baking and end up in a variety of odd shapes. Anyway, take each piece and flatten it and stretch it before placing it on a baking sheet.
Bake the seitan wings for ~7 minutes on each side at 400F. When mine came out of the oven they looked a little puffy, and smelled like pizza!
Next you need to get your milk mixture and breading ready. You’ll also need to heat ~1 inch of oil in a skillet. Once the oil is hot, start taking each wing and dipping it into the milk mixture before rolling it in the breading. Then simply fry for about 30 seconds on each side.
Once you’ve battered and fried all of the wings, simply toss them in the hot sauce mixture, and enjoy! This appetizer is sure to satisfy vegans and omnivores alike!
