Veggie Meat, Too

Rosemary Sweet Potato Gluten Links.

• 1 1/2 cup vital wheat gluten
• 1/4 cup nutritional yeast
• 1 t curry powder
• 2 T freshly pureéd rosemary
• 1 t rubbed sage
• freshly ground pepper
• 2 t garlic powder
• 1/8 t cayenne pepper
• 1/4 t ground nutmeg
• wet:
• 3/4 cup vegetable broth
• 6-8 T sweet potato purée, based on moisture content
• 2 T oil

Unless you plan to let your sausage sit overnight, preheat you oven to 325F. This is one of those dishes that will need to bake on “low and slow,” as Alton Brown would say. Mix together dry ingredients, and in a separate and larger bowl, your wet ingredients. Work the dry into the wet, and when it stiffens, get in and squeeze it in your hands until everything is all kneaded into a ball.

Previously we’ve baked the sausages unwrapped, but that just doesn’t work to give you a finished product that looks like something you’d want to share with your loved ones (!). In order to get the gluten to look like actual links, wrap them tightly in foil, and bake them wrapped for 90 minutes.

If you’re going to use your links in another dish, they can be baked for 30 minutes, then chopped and added to whatever, and baked again.

Ever since finding HCWT’s version of the postpunk people’s seitan o’ greatness, we’ve been eager to see what else we could do with it. There’s lots of room for interpretation!

Gluten powder or flour or vital wheat gluten — whatever it’s called in your neck of the woods — is a fairly forgiving substance, but in making our links, we erred on the side of adding too much “stuff,” and not enough gluten to balance it. The texture isn’t as tender as our previous batch, but the spiciness of the cayenne came through nicely. The rosemary and sweet potato combination turned out to be complimentary, and next time we’ll wrap the links. Next we’ve set our sights on a spicy basil chili link, maybe with a bit of coconut and ginger, with a nod to our Thai proclivities, and we’ve got gluten enough to try again!

One thing that did work well for us was prepping our gluten overnight. If you get a late start, don’t worry! The gluten flour will absorb all of the liquid overnight, and these are great to just pop into the oven for breakfast the following day. We enjoyed ours with oatmeal and stewed ginger apples. Yum.

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