rants & recipes

How to make a Seitan Pipe Bomb

Posted by ataraktos on 2010-12-29

Ok, it's taken us a while but we think we finally figured out a way to make seitan sausages without all the aluminum foil wastage. We've tried lots of things, but, under pressure and heat, seitan has always managed to escape. Below is the solution that's worked for us (albeit only with 3 tubes but that's greater success than we've had with all sorts of other contraptions) - I should add a disclaimer now, however - anything that blows up in your kitchen, including any bodily harm you may encounter, as a result of methods tried from this post below, is solely your own responsibility. Attempt at your own risk. If you proceed, use cation, due diligence and common sense.

Ok, so our reusable seitan solution uses:

  • cannoli forms - we used these.
  • silicon stoppers - we used these - this size fit in the above cannoli forms well.
  • silicon rubber bands - you don't want to put regular rubber bands in a pressure cooker. Ask me how I know this.  They might not be necessary, though? We had them on hand, from previous attempts.
  • some random stainless steel wire, sent to us by mistake/wrong order - not sure of the gauge - fairly thick
  • small stainless steel washers
  • large stainless steel washers

We only tried one "bomb", with three filled forms, as we didn't want to waste effort on too many failures. It was very cool, opening the pressure cooker and it not being full of escaped sausage! Even cooler - hopefully, this is the last time I'll use so much aluminum foil for sausages. The only drawback, I suppose, is these sausages are fairly skinny. But I can live with that.

After construction (bending the little curls in the wire), this was very easy to assemble - just separate the washers to their ends and insert filled, stoppered forms. (Another note of caution - the pressure actually, slightly, deformed the larger washers!)

Here's the little "pig tail" in the end of the wire. Note, this is the only "pig part" involved in the making of these sausages! =)

Close-up of stoppers in forms: