Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, where we’re slowly burrowing to the center of the earth with a teaspoon. I’m your Mini-Mine Foreman, Jon O’Guin, and today’s dish is entirely vegan, sounds like the devil, and is a weird mix of “very easy”, “amazingly effective” and “probably not worth it” and is the result of thousands of years of culinary history, and the app TikTok.  If you just want the recipe, you can follow this link to get started. Everybody else, let’s dig in.

Does Anyone Truly Wake Up Feeling Like P Diddy?

TikTok, if you don’t know, is an app. If, like me, you watch Late Night TV shows on YouTube, you might have seen the semi-recent (like, mid-to-late January) trend of “Sea-Shanty TikTok”. If you didn’t, a “very quick” explanation will clear it up.

I promise, this isn’t too hard to understand.

TikTok is an app where you can upload videos that are typically fairly short. They were originally 15 seconds, which was then expanded to 60 seconds, and you can do some finagling by like, uploading a video from somewhere else if you want even more time. As a mid-range Millennial, I understood it as “Vine, but with more teenage girls dancing, and therefore probably not something a fat bearded man in his 30’s should delve too deeply into.” And if you don’t know what Vine was, it was an app where you could upload videos with the restriction that they could only be 7 seconds long. It existed for like, 3 years, and it kind of served as like, a weird mix of “America’s Funniest Home Videos/Candid Camera/early Youtube” for the era of people invested in it: A lot of people edited together set-ups to make fun little sketches, filmed the reactions of people responding to surprising or unusual events they’d set up, uploaded quick clips of their kids/friends/pets being silly, showed off dance moves, all sorts of visual stuff. It was bought by Twitter, and shut down in 2016, but it’s remembered fondly.

From the ashes of that, arose TikTok, which launched in 2018. There’s a bunch of little/interesting changes that are too complicated to really get into, but one interesting detail/change between TikTok and Vine, and the critical one to the sea-shanty process, is the inclusion of ‘Duets’, where you can post a video that plays at the same time as someone else’s video, as a response, reaction, or, yes, DUET, with that first person. People can then do the same to YOUR video, building on both the original and your reaction to it. There’s some fun stuff in terms of reactive comedy people have done (ie, like, I upload a video of myself throwing a football off the left side of my screen, someone makes a Duet of a football flying INTO their screen knocking them out/breaking something/whatever.) But Sea Shanty TikTok specifically evolved out of the original intent: one guy uploaded a video of him singing a catchy sea shanty with him pounding out the rhythm, and people added themselves singing it in various ranges, them providing counter-harmonies, playing instruments, etc, until it was essentially an impromptu 10 person choir singing the same song.

Boom, you now understand Sea Shanty TikTok. Which is in no way relevant to today’s post, which is more closely tied to what I think of as “Utili-TikTok”: another interesting difference between TikTok and Vine is the relative utility achievable in 1 minute over 7 seconds. In 7 seconds, you can tell a pretty quick and solid joke. In 1 minute, you can:

-Give a fast-forward overview of a recipe

-Explain the basics/a striking example of an academic concept or social issue. (Such as the issue of “time poverty”: the idea that people can suffer if they do not have enough discretionary or “free” time. So a mother who commutes for an hour every day, works an 8 hour day, and also has to do all the laundry, dishes, cooking, cleaning, and childcare in the house might not be too worried financially, but might be sufficiently “time-poor” that it negatively affects her and her family. (Doesn’t have time to cook some days, so instead the family gets McDonald’s; doesn’t have time to take the car to the shop, so it eventually breaks down; doesn’t have time to go to the doctor, so she gets sicker; etc)

-Share a hack for home repairs/work-out tips/academic enterprises/cleaning/whatever

For instance, maybe it was in the manual, but until today, I was unaware my phone was recording on literally the SECOND WORST resolution it could for video.

So there’s more utility possible in TikTok, and it’s that first category that brings us the recipe of the day. Called “Two Ingredient Vegan Chicken”, the recipe is actually recreating a technique that was invented thousands of years ago, and one we’re replicating today. Before I explain too much more about it, let’s actually get started.

Summoning Seitan

So, the first step of the process is very simple: you’re going to make a ball of dough. The original TikTok user doesn’t give any proportions, but, following the YouTuber EmmyMade, I went with about 3 cups of Flour, and a little over 1 cup of water.

Seen here, looking very bland.

And then we’re letting it rest for an hour, which is time I will use to spill the beans on what we’re doing today. Firstly, I want to make this warning VERY CLEAR:

IF YOU HAVE GLUTEN ALLERGIES OR A GLUTEN SENSITIVITY, DO NOT MAKE THIS.

That should hopefully do. Because here’s the thing: this recipe does not CONTAIN Gluten, it IS gluten.  Straight-up, this is a recipe for seasoned and cooked wheat gluten. Confused? Let’s break it down.

As you hopefully know, and I no longer have the interest or energy to check if I’ve explained, Gluten is a protein structure that arises when you take cereal flours (predominantly wheat, but to a lesser extent with Rye, Barley, etc) and form doughs out of them: proteins in the flour interlock, forming a sort of mesh. This is, as a detail, what makes bread chewy, and the thing the bubbles in bread are IN: the bubbles are where water in the bread turned to steam (or gases from the yeasts) and inflated a small pocket of gluten.

So how do you make it? Well, the first step is make a bread dough, kneading to help gluten form, and the next step is to wash it. So after an hour or so of sitting, you take your dough ball, and you start adding water to it, and kneading it in the water. The results will be very weird, if you’d used to making bread.

It looks like it’s melting. Which, in a way, it is.

See, Gluten is NOT water-soluble, meaning it will not dissolve in water. But starch IS. So as you work the dough in water, the water is washing away all the parts of the dough that AREN’T gluten. This will take some time, and can be surprisingly messy. Luckily, I was finally able to use provided safety equipment!

What a beautiful apron. Lot of good pockets. Ignore my ever-growing widow’s peak.

That is an apron made for me by my grandmother, after I noted that (especially when baking) I could use an apron. (I have a terrible habit of forgetting my hands are covered in flour, and patting my hands on my thighs, scratching my ‘chest’ without thinking, and generally coating my clothes in flour. But now, I have protection from such foolishness, in this neat (and adjustable: the ties and the neck loop are the same material, so I can set it higher for more space to tie off the back if I want.) little number, and its brother.

Anywho, enough showing off Christmas presents it took me 3 months to use. We’re washing dough. Speaking of, you’re going to want to replace the water a couple times: it can only wash out/absorb so much starch at a time. Emmy did 6-7 washings, while I have no idea how many I did. I just followed the direction of “go until the water is clearISH, but not fully clear”, and worried that I didn’t knead my dough enough at the start, because I was washing out a LOT of substance. From my initial 3 cups of flour, 1 cup of water, I ended up with a ball of gluten around like, 2/3rds to 3/4s of a cup.

I thought I had a picture before the seasoning, but I was wrong. But still, “smaller than the top of a tub of margarine”.

It’s got a very unusual texture, almost silly-putty like in how it stretches and squishes. And now you’re in a position to have some fun, because it’s time to season this sucker. The exact proportions are going to vary on your gluten ball, and personal taste, but in general, something like 3/4 – 1 teaspoon of salt, a half teaspoon of black pepper, and then some mixture of paprika, garlic powder, onion powder, cayenne, whatever. I worked in a bit of my Umami Seasoning, you could add like, soy sauce… because the thing is: whatever you add here is what it’s going to kind of taste like. You’re not going to get a true “chicken” flavor out of it (unless you added something that tasted like chicken), but you can get some tasty stuff.

You fold the spices into your gluten glob, working it a little to ensure everything’s evenly mixed, and then let it sit another hour.

It somehow gets goopier.

Yeah, this is where the “Is it worth it?” comes from: the recipe is SUPER simple, but it’s SO LONG. And you can just go BUY this stuff in plenty of stores.  Though you might need a little linguistic help to find it. The Chinese name for this is miàn jīn, meaning “meat/tendon of dough”, and it’s frequently referred to seitan in the West, after a Japanese…let’s call him an “experimental dietician” in the 1900’s dubbed the product that. (Seitan is a portmanteau neologism, which sounds very worrying, but just means “A new word we made up by smashing two existing words together.” Like how email stands for “electronic mail”.) Interestingly, the name was originally used for a specific seasoning, then for brown rice or wheat gluten (fu, in Japanese) seasoned with it, and now mostly for ”seasoned and formed wheat gluten”. Indeed, until I started researching this recipe, I had definitely forgotten that seitan wasn’t soy-based.

But yeah, you can probably go buy this at a local supermarket or an Asian grocer if the big boxes around you aren’t carrying it, so the main utility for this recipe is “if you’ve got a specific flavor profile you want to hit”, or “you’re going to spend the day around the house, and want to feel the accomplishment of hand-making it”, since sure, it takes about 3 hours, but of that time, only about 20 minutes is spent actually DOING stuff. The other 160 minutes are just waiting.

To the Meat of the Matter

Anyhow, the next step is to reinforce the ‘muscle fibers”, as it were. You’re going to twist the gluten, and then knot it, a process I have no pictures off because it took both my hands, but the result was this.

Basically just a big doughy square knot.

This will create a replica of the ‘grain’ you see in meat, giving a sense of texture.

Now, it’s time to cook. For this, you want a bit of olive oil, and a pan over medium heat. Plop your gluten knot down, and fry on one side about 1-2 minutes. You want just enough of a crust to form that it’s a little crispy, and nicely browned.

This side isn’t actually all that crunchy, but it IS very nice looking.

Flip it, do the same to the other side, and for this next step…I don’t know how to help you, but holy shit, do NOT do what I did. The next step is to add ½ a cup of vegetable broth to the skillet, which I did, just to watch as my pan went APESHIT. Yeah, it turns out adding cool liquid to frying-temp oil results in a seething mass of bubbles and spluttering, coating everything nearby in a spray of boil-blasted broth.

The pan calling the kettle wet.

I GUESS the trick would be to lower the heat first, or to move it off the heat, or something, but I didn’t have time to really think it through: my weekend (and indeed, today) were kind of engulfed with Chaos to the degree that I was making this recipe knowing I would have to abandon it in the next 10 minutes because it now overlapped with a prior engagement. But that’s fairly fine: once you get the broth in the pan and simmering, you slap a lid on, and simmer for 45 minutes, adding water (or more broth) as needed, and flipping the ‘chicken’ once or twice to ensure it cooks on both sides.

The result…is not particularly appetizing to look at.

It does look like meat, though. Just…not great meat.

Nor was it particularly great to EAT, all things told. It had a notable rubbery/chewy texture, a worrying color and other shortcomings. But I will give it this: It was kind of astounding how well it worked despite all those failings. As I said: “if you told me this was like, microwaved chicken-fried steak, I’d believe it.” Nate legitimately did not know and did not realize while eating that it wasn’t meat: he assumed I had done something horrific TO a piece of chicken that created this off color and texture. So while this specific version didn’t produce amazing results, it DID create the certainty in my head that, with another 4-5 batches, I could MAKE a version that would. I could figure out where I went wrong, and get something that DID more closely resemble Chicken. Or I could just buy it. Whichever.

THURSDAY: JON TALKS A LITTLE MORE ABOUT THE VARIOUS KINDS OF MEAT SUBSTITUTES,  OR GETS DISTRACTED AGAIN, WHO KNOWS.

MONDAY: WE FINISH UP MEATLESS MARCH WITH A DISH I’VE BEEN PLANNING ON MAKING FOR MONTHS. DO YOU LIKE KETCHUP ON YOUR EGGS? LET’S WOK ABOUT IT.

Recipe

“Wheat Chicken”, or “Chicken-style Seitan”

Makes 1 serving

Ingredients

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 ¼ cup water

1 tsp kosher salt

¼  tsp freshly ground black pepper

2- 2 ½  tsp assorted other spices, to taste. (I’d recommend like, ½  tsp garlic powder, ½  tsp onion powder, ½ tsp paprika as a base, and then toss in another tsp of whatever mix floats your boat. I did cayenne, Umami Seasoning, and Poultry seasoning, but find what works for you.)

2 tbsp vegetable oil

1 ½ cup vegetable broth.

Preparation

1. Combine the flour and water in a bowl, and work into a smooth dough, about 5 minutes. Cover, and let sit for 1 hour.

2. Wash your dough, adding water and working it in the water so the water turns opaque, working about 1 minute per “wash”, before draining and adding more water, about 7 times, or until water is translucent, but not transparent. Drain, and pat gluten dry. Add the seasonings, and fold gluten until seasonings are distributed. Let rest, covered, an additional hour.

3. Take your gluten, and roll into a “snake” at least 1 foot long, rolling and pinching dough as needed. Twist the snake, and then tie into a knotted mass.

4. In a skillet, heat the vegetable oil over medium heat. Add the gluten knot, and fry 2-3 minutes per side, until nicely browned and lightly crisped. Reduce heat, and carefully add ½ cup of vegetable broth. Bring to a simmer, cover, and cook 45 minutes, turning the gluten twice, and adding additional broth as needed.

5. Remove from the pan, and serve.