It's vital wheat gluten. It's listed in quite a few recipes in my favourite vegan cookbook back home, yet I've never seen it for sale in the UK. In retrospect, deciding to carry a package of unidentifiable white powder through American customs in my hand luggage might not have been the best decision but happily I got it back home in one piece & last weekend, finally got around to cooking with it.
It may not sound like the most exciting of ingredients to non-vegans but really, it's great stuff for making burgers & sausages as it binds like only egg can do. Consequently, I made two recipes with it. The first was vegan chorizo. You mix the gluten, pinto beans & a host of other lovely things including smoked paprika & cayenne pepper together in a food processor till you get a spongy mass like this.
The gluten does it's magic making the dough easy to roll into four sausage shapes which you then wrap in foil, tightly twisting the ends, and pop into a steamer.
40 minutes later the sauages turn out like this. Firm and tender, just like meat sausages. They're ready eat straight away or you can slice them up to top pizza, put in sandwiches, add to pasta sauces etc.
The second recipe was for black bean burgers & again the gluten worked a treat, making the burgers really easy to shape & helping to make them firm when cooked. Just need to find out where to buy this stuff in the UK now.
