Guest Post: Vegan Seitan Barbecue Ribs

In just about a week my single days will be over and I will be marrying my best friend (insert awwws here). It's shaping up to have the makings of a really wonderful day of family, celebrating, and of course, food. Food can be a touchy subject, especially when you're talking vegan food. But since my husband-to-be is mostly vegan and I'm all vegan, we decided it really only made sense to go the vegan route and serve a mixture of faux meat proteins and vegetables that would hopefully make everybody happy.

To have a vegan wedding can be easy if you plan on paying for a vegan caterer; however, after talking to a few, it became pretty clear that my family could do it cheaper and better. So my parents strapped on their catering caps, developed a menu based on my husband-to-be and my favorite foods, and set out a schedule to get everything made by the big day. I must say I'm quite impressed with what they've come up with and the work they've put in so far. My parents are great cooks and they're no novices when it comes to cooking for a crowd, but I was a bit skeptical about their ability to put together a meal 100% from scratch for 100+ people. But as we're just a few days away, I believe they're going to not only pull it off, but pull it off with flying colors.

In order to get so much food together with just the two of them, they've been pre-making, freezing, and canning a lot of the dishes and side dishes all summer. And all throughout the food-making process they have been emailing me and keeping me up to date with the status. Usually it's just a "we canned chili today," or "perfected the gluten free chocolate chip cookies." But when this very detailed description with associated photos came into my inbox, I knew it had to be shared, even if it puts my regular blog posts to shame with its descriptiveness.

So without further ado, my father's guest post, or as he called it "a photo experience" on making vegan barbecue ribs:

Start with an empty counter:

Add all the dry ingredients: gluten, paprika, onion powder, nutritional yeast:

Mix them together:

Combine all the wet ones: water, liquid smoke, soy sauce:

Add to the dry and mix them together:

Take them out of the bowl and you have big lumps of mixture:

Pull them apart into tiny 1 x 2 inch pieces:

In the meanwhile, put 2 gallons of water, 1/3 cup hot sauce and 2 tbsp salt in pot to boil:

After the ribs soak up the water they look like this:

They cook for 30 minutes and then you strain them. This is 1/3 of the ribs. Notice how much bigger they are:

Then you put them on drying racks to dry. There will be 4 trays like this:

Here they are waiting to be desiccated:

4 hours later they are much smaller than when they went in. They're slightly crunchy on the outside:

Put them in a big bowl and a whole bunch of bbq sauce and let them sit there, swimming in yummy sauce for an hour or so:

Then put them in two pans (this in one of them) and put them in the oven for 30 minutes:

There you have it. 7 hours of time and about 120 (depending on how many you sample along the way ribs.
Vegan Seitan Barbecue Ribs

Ingredients:

8 cups gluten

1/3 cup paprika

1 cup nutritional yeast
1/3 cup onion powder
6 cups water
1/4 cup liquid smoke
1/2 cup soy sauce
2 gallons water
1/3 cup hot sauce
2 tbsp salt

Directions:
Mix together the gluten, paprika, nutritional yeast, and onion powder.

In a small bowl, mix water, liquid smoke, and soy sauce. Add to gluten mixture.

After well combined, pull the gluten mixture apart into desired shapes and sizes and boil in the water, hot sauce, and salt mixture for 30 minutes.

Strain the gluten pieces and lay on dryer racks. Let dry at 155 for 4 hours rotating trays every 30 minutes.

Take out and put 32 oz of barbecue sauce on and let sit for 1 hour.

Put on ungreased baking sheets and bake for 30 minutes at 300˚F.

Makes 120 ribs.