Mongolian seitan recipe 🥢 - James Strange (2024)

FAQs

How do you make seitan not tough? ›

Add slightly more water in the dough , the more tender the dough, the more tender the finished product. Add the water in small stages, if you make it too soft, add more seasoned gluten powder. I prefer a chewy seitan; one with body that makes neat slices.

This Vegan Mongolian Beef is made from soy curls and has the best texture and flavor! Serve it with rice and your favorite veggie side dish. This is one of my favorite soy curl recipes to date! They are marinated, tossed in corn starch and fried until crispy.

Boiling seitan makes it have a brainy spongey texture, frying seitan (without first steaming it) makes it rubbery and spongey, baking it makes it dry and rubbery. Steaming seitan, on the other hand, will yield the perfect meaty, juicy, chewy, yet tender seitan every single time.

A too wet, too soft dough is going to make a gummy, soft seitan. This could be because you used a tofu that was not super firm, or not pressed well enough so it was holding extra liquid. Or if there was water suggested in the recipe, you did not wait to add it until the end.

That's because restaurants use baking soda or cornstarch to tenderize the meat. It's a process called velveting beef. While the beef is tender (artificially so), it's lacking true beefy flavor. I gave up ordering Mongolian Beef years ago once I figured out how to make it better at home.

Like many stir fry dishes, it is important to thinly slice the meat, which means stir-frying will obviously overcook the meat, which in turn will make it tough and chewy. No one wants chewy and tough beef. so this way we will have tender beef stir fry.

You're not likely to find this kind of "Mongolian beef" in either Mongolia or China, but you will see a very similar dish, 葱爆牛肉 (cung1 baau3 ngau4 juk6), or beef stir fry with green onions, in China.

Don't let it dry out – If you overcook seitan, it will become tough, chewy and dry, which is not what you want!

Using a food processor to “knead” the dough creates fibrous, textures nearly resembling meat. The more you process the dough, the more fibrous/meaty your homemade Seitan becomes.

soy sauce or tamari - Adds saltiness, umami, and depth of flavor. balsamic and apple cider vinegar - Vinegar rounds out the flavor profile and helps disguise the subtle bitterness of vital wheat gluten. fat - Including a little bit of oil or other fat improves the overall flavor and tenderizes the seitan.

Can you overwork seitan? ›

Once mixed with liquid and the other things in this recipe, the vital wheat gluten will form a dough. This is not a dough we knead--actually, the less we touch it the better. Overworked seitan is rubbery and gross.