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This is it!
This pepperoni has the firmness, the bite, the spiciness, and the texture of its non-vegan counterpart, and no one would ever know them apart. Made in the larger-than-life NYC pizza slice style, it satisfies all the cravings, having you come back for more.
Ingredients
Directions
In a food processor (ideally one with a dough attachment) mix everything from the water to the red food dye, for 7-8 minutes, or until the gluten develops. You need to clearly see the gluten strands. Do not stop before this happens!
While your processor is busy with the gluten, you can chop up the beans, pasta, and cheese, and place them all in a large mixing bowl. Once the gluten is ready, chop/tear it up as well, and mix it into the beans, pasta, and cheese.
Once you are satisfied with it, re-shape the dough into a log shape, and then wrap it tightly in foil. This should make one large pepperoni log, 6 inches long, around 2~2,5 inches in diameter (or go for two smaller ones- your call). Wrap in second foil, to make sure it stays put and does not open up while steaming.
Steam for 1 hour and 20 mins.
Refrigerate overnight.
Slice medium thin, and pan fry both sides in olive oil. Let chill for 20 minutes, or more, before placing it on a pizza, and before baking the pizza. This way the pepperoni stays firm, and gives the most perfect bite and chew.
If you just place it on a pizza, in its “raw” form, the baked roni will be much softer, and can also dry out, without the extra oil.
The sliced-up pepperoni keeps in the fridge for 10 days, but as this recipe gives quite a few portions, my suggestion is to slice it all up, divide your desired portion sizes, wrap them in foil, and freeze.
It lasts up to a month (possibly even more, it just never lasts my home past this time).
Quick defrost and pan fry, gets them ready for pizza, sandwiches, or wherever your pepperoni needs may take you.
* If adding cheese: It will melt when you bake/fry, so it’s more for the visual on the dry cut itself. As vegan cheese can be an expensive buy, and it doesn’t really add much to the flavor (it’s like it’s whispering while the other stuff is screaming), this is the one ingredient most easily removed.
** Not all brands of VWG are created equal. Anthony’s (4 pounds at $19 at Amazon) rules supreme.
*** McCormick red food coloring is certified vegan, wonderfully saturated, and adheres to gluten amazingly. Even when washing flour, you can color it before the wash, and it will not wash out. Do yourself a favor and get it. It will up your seitan game.
More Sausage Recipes
Ingredients
Directions
In a food processor (ideally one with a dough attachment) mix everything from the water to the red food dye, for 7-8 minutes, or until the gluten develops. You need to clearly see the gluten strands. Do not stop before this happens!
While your processor is busy with the gluten, you can chop up the beans, pasta, and cheese, and place them all in a large mixing bowl. Once the gluten is ready, chop/tear it up as well, and mix it into the beans, pasta, and cheese.
Once you are satisfied with it, re-shape the dough into a log shape, and then wrap it tightly in foil. This should make one large pepperoni log, 6 inches long, around 2~2,5 inches in diameter (or go for two smaller ones- your call). Wrap in second foil, to make sure it stays put and does not open up while steaming.
Steam for 1 hour and 20 mins.
Refrigerate overnight.
Slice medium thin, and pan fry both sides in olive oil. Let chill for 20 minutes, or more, before placing it on a pizza, and before baking the pizza. This way the pepperoni stays firm, and gives the most perfect bite and chew.
If you just place it on a pizza, in its “raw” form, the baked roni will be much softer, and can also dry out, without the extra oil.
The sliced-up pepperoni keeps in the fridge for 10 days, but as this recipe gives quite a few portions, my suggestion is to slice it all up, divide your desired portion sizes, wrap them in foil, and freeze.
It lasts up to a month (possibly even more, it just never lasts my home past this time).
Quick defrost and pan fry, gets them ready for pizza, sandwiches, or wherever your pepperoni needs may take you.
* If adding cheese: It will melt when you bake/fry, so it’s more for the visual on the dry cut itself. As vegan cheese can be an expensive buy, and it doesn’t really add much to the flavor (it’s like it’s whispering while the other stuff is screaming), this is the one ingredient most easily removed.
** Not all brands of VWG are created equal. Anthony’s (4 pounds at $19 at Amazon) rules supreme.
*** McCormick red food coloring is certified vegan, wonderfully saturated, and adheres to gluten amazingly. Even when washing flour, you can color it before the wash, and it will not wash out. Do yourself a favor and get it. It will up your seitan game.
This recipe was pretty intriguing and since i had all the specialty ingredients for it I decided to give it a go to hopefully let others know if its worth it obtaining all the ingredients. Unfortunately, this was quite disappointing and I regretfully have given it only 1 star. It’s a bummer since it utilizes a fair amount of expensive ingredients like methyl cellulose and Kappa carrageenan.
I want to go into some detail in case the author or any other people who have tried it or want to try it can glean some info. FWIW I’m not a seitan beginner, but this is the first seitan recipe i’ve used that incorporates firming agents like the methyl/cappa so I could just not be familiar with how the process might differ from traditional vwg seitan recipes.
First of all, the dough did not come together into a cohesive dough in the food processor at all. I think this could be because the dough was too dry to form the gluten strands to form the dough. The problem with treating baking recipes such as seitan recipes with such precision in ingredient amounts is ingredients differ from brand to brand. Additionally volumetric measurement isn’t precise enough for measuring baking ingredients. So the author may be using specific brands of ingredients that work in the amounts specified where the brands i used don’t behave in the same way.
After cooking it seemed VERY promising. The exterior looked much more like a uniform pepperoni log than any seitan pepperoni i’ve made because it didn’t have the uneven texture on the outside and it didn’t seem to expand much at all in the oven like a traditional seitan does.
But the flavor profile of this pepperoni was basically just sundried tomato. That’s not necessarily bad, but none of the other flavoring ingredients really ended up coming through. So more like a sundried tomato seitan than a pepperoni.
The finished texture was very crumbly. This is again probably because my dough didn’t come together, but I ended up removing the dough from the food processor and hand kneading it for about 10 minutes on the counter and even then it did not want to form much of a dough. This crumbly texture made it very hard to slice, and slices were forced to be even thicker than the author’s recommended “medium thin” and far too thick to be added onto pizza IMO. But because the recipe includes methyl cellulose it feels like a waste to consume this pepperoni cold on crackers.
I did however attempt to prepare the slices the way the author defines, and then also trying it on top of pizzas both in the home oven and in the ooni. Unfortunately the end result of each was just as disappointing as my initial taste tests.
I really wanted to not give this a single star but the whole experience was such that I don’t think i could ever bring myself to try the recipe again just to confirm my results. There are better vegan pepperoni recipe options than this, even though I also find most to be disappointing compared to my memory of pepperoni. I guess we all need to press on to keep making better and better stuff.