Seitan Hotdogs – Unbelievable Vegan Frankfurters

Seitan is great for making any kind of meat-free sausage but these frankfurter sausages make the perfect hotdog. The smooth consistency and the way you can incorporate flavours into seitan mean making a big batch of hotdogs is really simple.

If you have never heard of seitan before then you might be confused as to what it actually is. Seitan is made from wheat, the protein part of wheat is gluten. This gluten has a dense, firm texture that really is quite meaty.

By using plant-based ingredients and flavours we can take seitan and make a high protein vegan frankfurter that tastes and feels like a meat one.

There are two options for making seitan, either start from scratch using white bread flour or sourcing a type of flour called vital wheat gluten.

How Is Seitan Made?

Seitan can be made from ordinary wheat flour by first making a dough with water and kneading it. Kneading the dough creates gluten just like when you make a loaf of bread. This dough is then soaked in water and kneaded in the water which removes the starch from the flour leaving behind the protein. The flour is washed several times in water removing around 70 – 80% of the starch and carbohydrates and the resulting gluten can then be shaped, flavoured and cooked, this is seitan.

Using Vital Wheat Gluten

If this sounds like a lot of work then you can buy flour that has already been washed, just as described above. The resulting flour is called vital wheat gluten.

Vital wheat gluten is perfect for making hotdogs and many other vegan meat substitutes because you can mix it with water,  herbs, spices and other flavours into a dough. This can be shaped and then cooked, in our case to make the perfect vegan hotdog.

Flavouring Our Seitan Hotdogs

Hotdogs have a fairly distinct flavour that we can easily recreate with plant-based ingredients to make them vegan.

First of all, we need to make our seitan really savoury to give it a meaty taste and then we can use herbs and spices to create the flavour of a regular hotdog.

Using ingredients high in glutamates will give the seitan an umami quality.

• Onion powder
• Garlic powder
• Miso Paste

Give us a savoury flavour that we want and then the bolder spices and flavourings give us the hotdog flavour we want.

• Mustard powder
• Ground coriander
• Grated nutmeg
• Smoked paprika
• Liquid smoke

Shaping Seitan Frankfurters

The great thing about making seitan sausages is we don’t need any sausage making equipment or sausage casings.

Our hotdogs are rolled into sausage shapes and wrapped tightly in foil  before being steamed. The cooking process makes the sausages expand into the foil creating perfect vegan hotdogs.

Cooking Seitan Hotdogs

Once the hotdogs have been shaped and wrapped in foil they are steamed. Steaming the seitan firms it up so when the hotdogs are unwrapped they hold their shape. 

Once steamed, the hotdogs can be left to cool and reheated when you are ready to eat them. 

Grill them on the barbecue, fry them in a little oil but remember that they are already cooked through so really just need heating up.