I am besotted with seitan recipes: the texture is so different from most other vegetarian and vegan foods, it’s cheap, and making ‛meat’ with it is so quick. I’m not fond of tofu and anyway have no fridge to store it, but seitan can often be substituted in tofu recipes.

These ‛Italian’ sausages are great on their own, in a bun/sandwich or in a sausage and white bean stew. The couscous/bulgar wheat is to give them a more sausage-like texture. If you don’t want to use that, go for the chorizo sausage recipe instead, and substitute the seasoning.

If you haven’t cooked with seitan before***, ***I strongly recommend you read right through the instructions first. You will need baking paper and a trivet for your pressure cooker, to follow this recipe.

Makes 8

Ingredients

1/4 cup fine bulgur wheat/couscous + 1/2 cup water

2 tbsp nutritional yeast

2 tsp smoked paprika

1 1/2 tsp fennel seeds roughly crushed

1 tsp cracked black pepper

1/2 tsp chilli flakes

1 tsp onion powder

1/2 tsp garlic granules

1/2 tsp salt

6 sundried tomatoes in oil, finely chopped OR 2 tbsp sundried tomato pesto

1 tbsp soy sauce

1 tsp yeast extract OR miso

1/2 tbsp tomato purée

1 tbsp olive oil/ or take some from the tomato jar

1/3 cup water

1 cup vital wheat gluten

Method:

Cut baking parchment into 8 sheets, approximately 200/8" x 150/6".

Heat 1/2 cup of water and our it over the couscous or bulgar wheat and wait until all the water is absorbed.

Mix in the nutritional yeast, smoked paprika, fennel seeds, cracked black pepper, Mixed Herbs, chilli flakes, onion powder, garlic granules* and salt, stirring between each addition so that it is all thoroughly combined. It has to be very thorough because once you add the vital wheat gluten, everything sticks together in a hurry and it’s hard to mix anything in.

Finely chop the tomatoes. Because this is so messy, I use scissors, holding the tomato over the bowl. You can hold onto the tomato right down to the last small piece and both it and the oil will go into the bowl.

Then add the **soy sauce, yeast extract, tomato purée, olive oil (or take some from the tomato jar) **and water. Again, mix thoroughly after each addition.

Now add the vital wheat gluten and mix as well as you can with your knife/spatula and then use your hand, incorporating all the flour that will be trying to stick to the edge of the bowl. Keep mixing until everything is blended and the dough stops sticking to your hand.

Place the dough on a board. Roughly shape it into a rectangle about 100 mm/4" across, or as long as you want your sausages to be. (Be warned that the dough is nowhere near as accommodating as bread dough when it comes to shaping it).

Cut the dough in half, quarters and then eighths If you want your sausages all to be the same, cut as accurately as possible. The dough doesn’t seem to stick very well to itself, once you’ve finished mixing it. Shape the sausages to be best of your ability – the wrapping finishes the job. Don’t worry about gaps and creases. The cooking sorts out most of that.

Now put each sausage, centred at the edge of a piece of baking paper and roll it up tightly. This helps make it cylindrical. Twist the paper at either end, like a Christmas cracker, until it’s squashed against the end of the sausage. Do this with all eight sausages.

Put the trivet into your pressure cooker. Add about half a cup of water – don’t let it cover the trivet. Place the sausages onto the trivet – it doesn’t matter if they are stacked – and bring up to pressure; cook for 10 minutes.

Let the pressure come down naturally.

When they’re cooked, take the sausages out of the pressure cooker and unwrap them. Put them somewhere where they can cool and dry out a little, before using or storing them. I find they keep best in my wooden bread bin! Fry them before eating them – the added olive oil gives additional flavour and I enjoy them cooked until they are slightly crisp.

Notes:

While the diced, sundried tomatoes certainly add to these sausages authenticity, they are quite messy and have a tendency to keep falling out as you create the individual sausages. If you tend to lose patience with fiddling around, I suggest you go for the pesto, instead.

*****If you find you like these sausages, you might prefer to make yourself a seasoning mix to keep in a jar, using **8 tbsp nutritional yeast, 8 tsp smoked paprika, 6 tsp fennel seeds, roughly crushed, 4 tsp cracked black pepper, 8 tsp Annie’s Mixed Herbs, 2 tsp chilli flakes, 4 tsp onion powder **and 2 tsp garlic granules.

If you’re not fond of biting on a fennel seed, use ground fennel instead.

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