Food Friday - Recipe: Vegan Sausage

Food Friday makes its triumphant return for 2011! As before, it won't be a weekly feature, but will pop up now and then, when I find a recipe or food item that I really want to share.

This week is a recipe that I found on the Vegan Dad blog. He found it on the Post Punk Kitchen blog.

I am a sucker for brats, sausages, chorizo, etc... Out of all of the things I miss from my transition to a vegetarian/vegan diet, brats et al are near the top of my list. I've tried many of the store brands with varying degrees of like. During the spring and summer, I make a weekly lunchtime pilgrimage to the vegan hot-dog cart that is just around the corner from my office for a brat with sauerkraut.

The great thing about this recipe is how simple and quick it is. It takes just a few minutes to mix the ingredients together, and there is no odd or unusual ingredients required.

I have eaten them straight out of the steamer (the first batch I made lasted a grand total of 45 minutes), and fried them up in a lightly-oiled pan with some onions, peppers, and mushrooms. I plan on making some for camping this summer with my boys and trying them on a hot-dog stick over the open fire and wrapping them up in a tin-foil pouch with some onions and peppers. The consistency leads me to believe that they will do just fine.

VEGAN SAUSAGES

INGREDIENTS

• 1/2 cup pinto beans, rinsed and drained
• 1 cup cold vegetable broth
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 2 tablespoons soy sauce
• 2 cloves garlic, grated (with a microplane, or very finely minced)
• 1 1/4 cups vital wheat gluten
• 1/4 cup nutritional yeast
• 1 1/2 teaspoons fennel seed, crushed
• 1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• Several dashes fresh black pepper

METHOD

1. Before mixing your ingredients, get your steaming apparatus ready, bring water to a full boil. The rest of the recipe comes together very quickly.
2. Have ready 6 sheets of tin foil. In a large bowl, mash the pinto beans until no whole ones are left. Throw all the other ingredients together in the order listed and mix with a fork (I mixed it with a fork until it was all wet, then I kneaded it with my hands for a minute or two until the gluten started to get stringy to give it a good texture). Divide dough into 6 even parts. Mold the dough into about a 5 inch log and place on a sheet of tin foil.
3. Wrap dough in tin foil, like a tootsie roll. Don’t worry too much about shaping it, it will snap into shape while it’s steaming because this recipe is awesome.
4. Place wrapped sausages in steamer and steam for 40 minutes.

VARIATIONS

This is such a simple recipe, and just screams to be modified. You could make it into a beer brat by substituting the broth for your favorite micro brew (haven't tried this), and adjusting the spices - swap the fennel seed for 1/4 tsp of dried mustard. Or, just play with it and see what you can come up with.

Enjoy! If you come up with a killer variation, drop a comment and let me know. I'd love to try it!