It tastes like chicken.

I read something a few days ago over at Jodi's blog about a mysterious cut of meat called "seitan". I had no idea what kind of animal "seitan" comes from. An exotic bird of some sort? A gazelle-like creature? I couldn't even guess. So I looked it up at Google and found out it was a vegetarian meat substitute made from wheat gluten. I suddenly became obsessed with the stuff. I began reading recipes on how to make it and how to prepare it.

Today I actually attempted to make seitan. I got a little flour (the wrong kind, but it was all I had), mixed it with water, and began rinsing out the starch. It disintegrated leaving me with a bunch of slimy little bits, but kept on rinsing. When I got tired of rinsing, I strained it as best I could, glopped it onto a paper plate, made it into a little mound, lightly salted it, and tossed it into the microwave for about ten or twenty seconds.

I figured it'd taste like the astonishingly bland bread I'd made in the microwave a few times in the past. (I get bored easily, so I was experimenting.) It didn't. First, the consistency was strange. It was sort of like gooey rubber. Or glue. I tasted it and it didn't exactly taste like my previous microwave bread atrocities. I can't really describe the taste, not quite bread-like and vaguely meatish. It reminded me of chicken. Kinda.

If the semi-edible mass I made reminded me vaguely of chicken, then properly prepared seitan must actually taste good. So now I have to track some of the real stuff down.