This past weekend I made sausages. Vegan Italian Feast Sausages, to be precise:
After going to Kia & Sean's housewarming party and having homemade vegan sausages, I was determined to learn to make them myself. It took me about a week to gather all the necessary ingredients, such as nutritional yeast (iHerb), wheat gluten (Vegeland), fennel seeds (FFM), beans, etc... I used the 'Italian Feast Sausage' recipe from 'Vegan Brunch,' but you can find the same recipe directly on the PPK blog too.
Vegan Sausages
(from the PPK)
Makes 4 big sausages
1/2 cup pinto beans, rinsed and drained
1 cup vegetable broth
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 cloves garlic, grated (with a microplane, or very finely minced)
1 1/4 cups vital wheat gluten
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
1 1/2 teaspoons fennel seed, crushed
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 teaspoon sweet paprika
1 teaspoon dried oregano
Several dashes fresh black pepper
Before mixing your ingredients, get your steaming apparatus ready, bring water to a full boil. The rest of the recipe comes together very quickly.
Have ready 4 sheets of tin foil. In a large bowl, mash the pinto beans until no whole ones are left. Throw all the other ingredients together in the order listed and mix with a fork. Divide dough into 4 even parts (an easy way to do this: split the dough in half and then into quarters). Place one part of dough into tin foil and mold into about a 5 inch log. Wrap dough in tin foil, like a tootsie roll. Don’t worry too much about shaping it, it will snap into shape while it’s steaming because this recipe is awesome.
Place wrapped sausages in steamer and steam for 40 minutes. That’s it! You can unwrap and enjoy immediately or refrigerate until ready to use.
I used canned cannellini beans that I got from the Foreign Food Mart.
Mixing all the ingredients together.
Here's the a crudely shaped log of 'dough' before it got rolled up in foil.
Steam time!
And after 45 minutes of steaming, voila! A perfectly shaped sausage. haha.
Ok, let's all just get it out of our system right now and have a good giggle over the way these sausages look. And the harsh lighting and ugly chopping board don't help their cause. But c'mon now, do sausages ever look attractive? :P
These were so tasty as is, right after being unwrapped! The combination of herbs and spices really brought the aroma of Italia, and the texture was dense, chewy, yet also a little juicy~ The flavors and textures were so similar to what I remember meat-sausages to be like, that it was really quite unbelievable.
I probably could've eaten several right there on the spot, but I also had to incorporate them somehow into an actual meal, so I pan-fried some slices and added them to some sauteed collards, onions, and olives, and had it with some rye bread (from Pain de Papa bakery). Now that I think of it, it was quite a gluten-heavy meal, but it was delicious!
So, my first foray into the world of homemade seitan was a success! I suddenly feel like a seasoned vegan veteran. Infact, I think I could get hooked on this stuff. The whole process was soooo much easier than I thought, and also quite fun! There are so many different flavor combinations and ways to incorporate sausages into other dishes, that I feel like a whole new world of cooking has opened up for me... bratwurst, breakfast sausages, Italian sausage pasta, and sausage pizza, here I come!
