seitan roast with sausage and pear stuffing and onion-cider gravy

The holidays are fast approaching - it seems faster and faster each year and I seem to get slower and slower with preparing for it! As I was making the Food Network Friday dish last week, I started thinking of different ways to stuff seitan, different methods to cook said stuffed seitan and the different occasions that would be great to have it at.

Last year I did the Holiday Roast, which most resembles a turkey in texture and stature. This year, I wanted to have another option, equally elegant and yet different enough from the Holiday Roast to be appropriate for the holiday table. In addition, I wanted to get it out on the blog to give folks enough time to plan for it. Hence our family's Holiday Dinner in September. Even the kids asked what we were celebrating.

The gluten contains only 8 ingredients, which I am loving a bunch. It is working out really well and is excellent without any weird seitan-y aftertaste.

The gluten is a modified version of last week's FNF, being pliable enough to stretch well and yet strong enough to not rip. I made a sausage (Tofurkey, but homemade, Field Roast or any other sausage would work equally well) and dried pear stuffing - dried apples, raisins, figs, cranberries would be great as well. The roast is braised in the oven for 3 hours and allowed to cool. On the day of the event, sear it in a pan and reheat it in the oven for about an hour. If you stuff the gluten so that it is thinner on the top than the bottom, it will bake into a thin, crispy sheet on the top, which you can see on the second pic.

I served this with an Onion-Cider Gravy, easy to make and complemented the dried fruit in the stuffing, and a Cauliflower Puree. After watching Hell's Kitchen for the umpteenth time,  Cauliflower Puree is a must have for any sophisticated 5-star meal. That and it tastes really good! Steam the cauliflower, drain well, puree in a food processor until it is very creamy, adding a few tablespoons of vegan butter. This will take a few minutes so don't stop short. After pureeing, season with salt, pepper and chives and a little bit of sugar if it is too bitter and let it cool until dinner. Reheat in a pot, stirring often for a few minutes, until hot. After making this, you too will feel a kinship with Ramsey. He can't be that bad - he went on Ellen to cut his finger. The irony.

Seitan Roast Stuffed with Sausage and Pear with Onion-Cider Gravy Recipe

FNF - stuffed chicken with smoked mozzarella, rapini and roasted tomatoes

           

Food Network Friday

FNF, hosted by Tamasin Noyes of American vegan Kitchen, Grills Gone Vegan and an upcoming sandwich cookbook, is recreating Robert Irvine's Stuffed Chicken with Smoked Mozzarella, Rapini and Roasted Tomatoes. Irvine happens to be one of my favorite Food TV chefs mainly because he isn't afraid to cook vegetarian. On the Dinner: Impossible show, he has always made sure to have at least one vegetarian option, as lame as his choice sometimes happen to be.  When he was replaced by that clod "Iron Chef," Michael Symon, my blood boiled - only Emeril and Paula beat him out for being more anti-veg.

This recipe was another something-stuffed with something and then baked.  I have posted two stuffed seitan recipes: one that was braised and one that was baked. I chose the straightforward approach here and just  baked the stuffed gluten with the smokey Daiya and roasted rapini and tomatoes. There are no commercially available smoked vegan cheeses, but it is a simple matter of adding a few drops of liquid smoke to the gluten stuffing. The gluten was very pliable and soft (another gluten recipe that needs more testing, but for which I will post the recipe as is). After stuffing, I rolled the gluten in some panko crumbs and baked them for about an hour. You must make sure to seal up the raw gluten around the filling very well otherwise you will wind up with more melted cheese on your pan than in your seitan.

The potatoes that accompany Irvine's recipe are simply roasted in the oven along with the seitan. I sprinkled ours with smoked salt to echo the smoke in the gluten rolls. They turned out buttery and creamy with just a slight smokey flavor.

The kids, especially Kate, really enjoyed this. In fact, while Mikel and Cat were picking out the strings of rapini stems, Kate casually glanced over as she meticulously cut her stuffed seitan and nonchalantly commented that, "Honestly, you can't even taste the rapini." As an adult, I can testify that you can indeed taste it, but as far as I am concerned, if it isn't discernible to a ten year-old, that's just fine by me.


Cost Breakdown

gluten: $1
olive oil: $1
tomato, rapini: $7
Cribari Tokay: $15
(Opici Marsala is vegan - thanks, Tami!)
shallot, veg stock, thyme: $1.50
Daiya: $5
potato, butter: $2.50
chives: $.25
Total to make 6 servings:
$33.25