Vegan seitan wellington is sooooo good. It is my celebratory end-of-semester dish...All out! Improved! So Good you won't want to talk while you eat it! And you will lick your plate!
All together this is a long drawn out process, especially if you are making the seitan. Hello!!! 90 minutes cook time! Yikes! But if you make a bunch of seitan ahead of time and save one for this recipe, it shouldn't be so much extra work. I do recommend making your own seitan and experimenting with the spices you like to make it perfect, because store bought seitan is just not that good, as is any other "home made" V "store bought" thing...and there are a million different types of seitan you can make... this recipe is similar to the seitan Mike has made before, but it eliminates the cinnamon and allspice and replaces that with more cumin and cayenne and adds thyme and oregano. Mike compensated for the re-cooking time a little bit and lowered the oven time by 10 minutes (to 80 minutes).
You will need:
Seitan recipe (as linked to above and reworked a bit)
Filo dough (as it is vegan versus puff pastry)
Earth Balance
Mushroom Sauce ingredients (described below)
This yields 4 good sized Wellingtons.
For the Mushrooom Sauce:
-1/2 yellow onion diced or 2 shallots
-4 large cloves of garlic
-about 2 tbs of vegan margarine (Earth balance)
-12 oz or about 4 cups of mushrooms chopped (I used baby bellas)
-1/4 cup red cooking wine
-1 tsp dried thyme
-1 tsp dried parsley
-salt and pepper to taste
Add the onion and 1 tbs of margarine to a pan and caramelize for about 5 minutes. Then add the mushrooms and the garlic and cook for about 5 minutes as the mushrooms brown up, adding the other tbs of margarine as needed. Add the cooking wine and spices and cook stirring occasionally until the wine has reduced almost completely, just enough so the mushroom mixture is just a little bit saucy.
While the mushrooms are cooking you can set the oven to 400 degrees F and prepare the Filo Dough and seitan.
Make squares/rectangles/triangles... really any shape that gives you enough room to add your sliced seitan and a pile of mushroom sauce and then fold the pastry over the pile so nothing is exposed, be reasonably generous.
Slice the Seitan roll into rounds about 1/4 in thick. If you happen to be too lazy to make your own and buy some from the store which doesnt come in a nice roll, but more like an amorphous blob, just cut up into bite sized pieces. Take the pastry shape and put it onto an un-greased cooking sheet/pan and put the Seitan in the center and pile 1/4 of the mushroom mixture on top. Fold the pastry dough over everything and close as best you can, also rub with about 1/2 tbs melted margarine so that the filo becomes flaky and delicious!
Put the complied pastries in the oven for about 20 minutes or until they are golden brown.
Now I know they look beautiful, but take a fork and knife to one and tell yourself that's not the best damn thing you've done for yourself in a long time.
One of these days I am going to muster up the guts to make this...and I so agree w/ the seitan being flavored to your own taste...b/c not everyone is into the same spices..
ReplyDeleteSo true!! I was actually talking to a friend about making this dish and I was telling her that it was really time consuming but also definitely worth it. I would suggest that you make a bunch of seitan ahead of time, a day or so before you want to make this recipe, so that the preparation and cooking time is split up. it takes about 20 minutes prep for the seitan and 80 minutes cook time, so that's a while. And if you make a bunch of it and just save a roll until you are going to commit to the wellington. Then you only have to prep and make the mushrooms and then wrap and cook the pastry, which in total, might take and hour.
ReplyDeleteThis just makes the entire task much less daunting and just as doable after a long day of work or school or w/e as anything else. I hope that you get a chance to make this! Let us know how it goes if you decide to try it!