This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable seitan recipes. It is made by washing wheat flour dough with water until all the starch granules have been removed, leaving the sticky insoluble gluten as an elastic mass, which is then cooked before being eaten.
Wheat gluten is an alternative to soybean-based foods such as tofu, which are sometimes used as meat analogue. Some types of wheat gluten have a chewy or stringy texture that resembles meat more than other substitutes. Wheat gluten first appeared during the 6th century as an ingredient for Chinese noodles. It has historically been popular in the cuisines of China, Japan and other East and Southeast Asian nations. Wheat gluten has been documented in China since the 6th century.
It was widely consumed by the Chinese as a substitute for meat, especially among adherents of Buddhism. Wheat gluten arrived in the West by the 18th century. De Frumento, an Italian treatise on wheat written in Latin by Bartolomeo Beccari in 1728 and published in Bologna in 1745, describes the process of washing wheat flour dough to extract the gluten. The word seitan is of Japanese origin and was coined in 1961 by George Ohsawa, a Japanese advocate of the macrobiotic diet, to refer to a wheat gluten product created by Ohsawa’s student Kiyoshi Mokutani. In 1962, wheat gluten was sold as seitan in Japan by Marushima Shoyu K. It was imported to the West in 1969 by the American company Erewhon. They are golden brown in color, and braised or boiled in a savory soup or stew before eating.
This type of gluten has a dense texture and ranges from off-white to light greenish grey in color. It is torn open into strips before being used as an ingredient in recipes. These are sold as small blocks in Chinese markets and are then diced up and cooked. This type of gluten absorbs its cooking liquid like a sponge and is enjoyed for its “juicy” character.