Vegan Bacon and Havarti Stuffed Seitan

What’s better than seitan? Stuffed Seitan! This recipe uses our Super Big Batch of Garlicky Seitan or you can use your favorite seitan recipe. Sometimes you can get away with just using nutritional yeast flakes for some cheesy flavor in recipes like soups and sauces. For this kind of recipe you need something that melts into a gooey cheesy mess. And for that we have only one choice; Daiya.

We love the melted goodness of Daiya cheese on almost anything – as you could probably tell from our pancake recipe. Unlike some other cheeses Daiya actually melts instead of staying in little cubes of cheese-ish flavored sponges.


• 1 Batch of seitan
• 4 – 5 slices of Lightlife Smart Bacon
• 3 ounces of Daiya wedge style Havarti Cheese

1. Slice all of the seitan pieces in half – originally we tried to only slice ¾ of the way through so the seitan would be sort of like a sub so it would have a hinge but they just fell apart for the most part.
2. Arrange all of the seitan pieces in a baking dish. Place half of a slice of bacon on one half of each seitan.
3. Slice the Diaya and place a slice on each piece of seitan opposite the bacon.
4. Broil in the oven until the Daiya begins to melt and is golden brown.

We served these with our butternut squash soup – there may have been some dipping of the seitan into the butternut squash soup which only added more flavor.

Super Big Batch of Garlicky Seitan

You will need a VERY large pot for this recipe, as it will make a very big batch of seitan. 

• 3 ½ cups of vital wheat gluten
• 2 ½ cups of vegetable broth (cold or warm, not boiling)
• 1 teaspoon of dried dill weed
• 1 cup of nutritional yeast flakes
• 10 cloves of garlic
• ¼ teaspoon of cayenne pepper
• ¼ cup lemon juice
• ¼ cup of olive oil

For the broth:

10-12 cups of water

Vegan vegetable broth mix or bouillon cube (I used about a tablespoon and a half of a jarred kind, but you can add according to how much flavor you want.)

1. Mix the wheat gluten, yeast flakes, and spices in a large bowl.

2. Mix the rest of the ingredients in a smaller bowl. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and combine with a wooden spoon or spatula for about a minute. Now knead the dough for several minutes. You can add a little more broth if there is extra dry ingredients that did not combine yet.

3. Once the dough is kneaded, separate into smaller clumps, about the size of your fist or a little smaller than that. The important thing to note is that the seitan dough expands a lot while cooking. I ended up with 8 or 9 clumps of seitan.

4. Bring about 10-12 cups of water to a boil in a large pot. Add in some vegetable broth mix or bouillon cubes and stir until combined. Add the seitan and then lower the heat to a simmer (I usually use medium heat, where it’s just barely bubbling) and then add a cover, yet make sure that there is room for steam to come out.

5. Cook the seitan over medium heat for about 1 hour. If you cut into it and the inside seems dry then you can cook it for some more time.

Hope you enjoy : )

A Very Vegan Thanksgiving

For almost every year of the past 24 years that I have been celebrating Thanksgiving my family has made ravioli. When I was younger my great grandmother would actually keep me home from school in order to help her make them. For the past decade or so though I have been a vegetarian, so I’ve only been able to share in the cheese ravioli. And for the past four years I’ve been enjoying a vegan Thanksgiving meal with my girlfriend, which is even more delicious because we make it together.

 

This year my family decided to take the easy round and order a complete cooked dinner from the store that I work at. My girlfriend and myself are the only two vegetarians of the bunch so we make our own separate meal. Normally this would begin with a trip to the store to buy a frozen Tofurkey ball. In past years this was great; earlier in the year however we started attempting to make our own seitan (the top left and top right in the picture) and we love it. So this year we decided to make our main dish instead of letting someone else.

The deliciousness that was this year’s meal began with homemade stuffing (bottome left of picture) made with hearty flax bread, celery, carrots, and shallots as well as diced apple. Making stuffing from a mix is just never the same as using bread that you’ve toasted yourself and then added freshly cooked veggies and stock. Adding diced apple is something that we tried a few months ago that we really enjoyed. After we added the broth and let the bread soak up all of the tastiness we sprinkled some Cheddar Daiya Cheese all over the top and baked it in the oven.

This stuffing was also the amazing interior of our main course – seitan wrapped in filo dough. We laid out a piece of filo dough and placed our seitan pieces that had been sliced in half and then filled with stuffing. These wrapped pieces of warm deliciousness were then baked until golden brown. When we cut into these on Thanksgiving Day there were amazing. Not exactly the same as having Tofurkey as a turkey substitute but that didn’t make them any less delicious.

Mashed potatoes (bottom right of picture) are always a given when it comes to this meal. We tried something new this year for our mashed potatoes. Generally we begin by boiling the potatoes and then adding vegan butter and almond milk until creamy and smooth. This time however, we decided to bake the potatoes instead of boiling them. This kept the entire dish a little bit lighter than usual which was a good change. And the final piece that made this meal complete was the roasted Brussels sprouts and kale. The crunchy pieces of kale tossed with quartered Brussels sprouts that were in no way soggy were a perfect side.

Dessert is something different all together and was an amazing combination of pumpkin and chocolate in the form of a muffin. This is our go-to recipe for dessert greatness and comes from one of our favorite vegan cookbook writers: Isa Chandra Moskowitz. If you haven't made anything that she's written about then you are truly missing out.