Phew - chapter one of the great seitan adventure is more-or-less complete. I wasn’t expecting it to be this difficult.  There’s so many possible variations.  I made thirty-four different varieties of sausage.  I ended up chewing and then spitting samples out like a wine buff, because even a gluten glutton like me couldn’t contemplate that much rubbery dough sat in my stomach.

I decided to focus on sausages for this part of the adventure.  I concentrated on the steaming-in-foil method, because it’s quick and easy, thus allowing for more variations in the same amout of time.

The starting point was Vegan Dad’s sausage recipe.  It came out as the most hilariously gross thing I have ever had the pleasure to cook:

I was so pleased that I posted the image to a thread “what’s your grossest food porn pic?” at the PPK forums.  My favourite response was:

“you win, dude. YOU. WIN.”

So anyway, in the following weeks, I steamed my way through a bewildering and message catalogue of sausage options.  I tried them mixed with mushrooms, apples, potato. I steamed them for 10 minutes, 30 minutes and 40 minutes. I wrapped them tight and I wrapped them loose.  I made them moist and sticky, and firm and powdery.  I ate them immediately and I left them overnight.

Here’s what I found:

You don’t need to steam them very long. 20 minutes is enough.  40 minutes and it starts getting unpleasantly firm.
Kneading doesn’t make any difference. In fact, the longer I kneaded them, the more rubbery they got.  This may not be true for other cooking methods, of course.
You need to add something mushy, moist, but with structure. This will keep the texture open and stop it drying out.  Mashed beans, grated apple, and finely chopped mushrooms all worked fairly well.  Mashed potato and mashed tofu worked to a limited degree but still resulted in a fairly dry sausage
Onion makes the best general moistening agent. It not only preserves moisture in the sausage, but also improves flavour (presumably through the introduction of sugars, resulting in a Maillard Reaction)
Gram flour reduces rubberyness and increases flouryness. 100% gluten flour is unpleasantly rubbery.  A high-protein flour decreases the rubberyness while maintaining good binding properties. I used gram flour (aka besan or garbanzo flour) because I do a lot of Indian cookery anyway.  About 30% gram flour gave the best balance.  50% gram flour was pronounced by an ominvore tester as “chickeny”. One for future exploration.
Pretty much all other texture-related additives give diminishing returns. I tried adding agar, tapioca, oil, rusk, breadcrumbs - they all made a difference, but a tiny one, and hardly worth it.  Oil was the interesting one.  I read somewhere that meat sausages are an emulsion of fat and meat.  I thought if I could get a fat emulsion in to the sausages, it might come out nicely.  If anything, the mouth feel of the oil sausage was worse.
Savoury flavours disappear when you fry a sausage. I found it hard to put in too many herbs.  On the other hand, tomato paste and liquid smoke become overpowering - presumably because other balancing flavours have vanished
They taste better when you leave them overnight. I guess it’s that Maillard Reaction again.

In some ways, I’m disappointed with my findings.  I was half-hoping to revolutionise the world of gluten sausages by discovering some new and exciting formula.  In fact, I’ve just found out that most of the existing recipes have it more or less right already.  I suppose the most interesting finding is that you can get away with simplifying it a lot.

Simple English Breakfast Sausages

Ingredients

• 2 cups gluten flour
• 1 cup gram flour
• 1 cup grated onion
• about 2 cups of water (depends on your onion and your flour)
• 2 tsp salt
• a big handful of chopped, fresh sage (maybe a bit of parsley and/or thyme, too)
• plenty of pepper
• 2 tsp ground nutmeg

Method

Mix the flours together.  Mix in the onion, salt, sage, pepper and nutmeg.  Add enough water to make a fairly moist ball of dough (you need less than you might think).  Briefly knead.

Form into sausages (about 10 or so) and roll gently in foil.  Twist the ends.

Throw in a steamer (or boil - it doesn’t make much difference) for 20 minutes.

Wait as long as you can (they taste best the next day) and fry gently for 10 minutes (the gram flour causes the “skin” to go quite chewy if you fry them too hard).  I like them in the English classic bangers-n-mash style: with mashed potato and mushroom gravy.  And plenty of mustard.

They freeze well, too.

And, have you ever seen such a splendid sausage montage? (originals here).