BBQ-Braised Vegan Air Fried Seitan Recipe
If you’re looking for something spicy, sticky, and chewy to sink your teeth into this summer, we’ve come up with the soluation to your BBQ cravings- BBQ_Braised Vegan Air Fried Seitan! This seitan recipe is as simple as they come- only using 4 ingredients in the dough itself, and is then air fried with no oil in small pieces to make seitan puffs. The puffs are braised in a simple combination of garlic, onion, BBQ sauce, water and a little sugar for a chewy and flavorful summer treat. There’s no reason being vegan should mean you can’t get all the flavors and textures you love in food- vegan BBQ here we come!
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Vegan Air Fried Seitan Recipe
I have an air fryer, and I like to play around with it and experiment. Since I’ve never really done a whole lot of deep frying, sometimes I’m not sure how foods will react to being fried (let alone being air fried). So when I decided to stick a few bits of seitan dough in the air fryer, I was pleasantly surprised. The tiny little scraps of seitan I stuck in ballooned up into small, golden spheres! Then, after removing them from the air fryer, I saw to my great sorrow that my perfect, golden spheres were shrinking. After a couple minutes, I was left with hard, wrinkled, jerky-like seitan. But all is not lost- we can still make a seitan recipe from here!
Looking to Air Fry? Try one of these recipes!
- Vegan Air Fried Cream Cheese Wontons
- Air-Fried Eggplant in Spicy Garlic Sauce with Jicama
- Air Fried Vegan Cheesecake Wontons
Vegan BBQ- All the Flavor, and No One Get’s Hurt!
Summer seems to be all about BBQ- and that doesn’t have to mean the grill! Aside from the cooking style, BBQ is all about the flavors- sweet, spicy, sour and smoky. And it turns out, you don’t need a grill or meat to create those dishes! Our friends over at Veganosity wrote a whole book about it! The flavors of BBQ are amazing, but the huge emphasis on meat really isn’t. It’s horrible to think about all the animals that die, and then get slathered with so much BBQ sauce you can’t really taste it anyway. That’s one of the reasons vegan BBQ can be such a good alternative- once the BBQ sauce comes on, all you need to do is come up with a good texture! Which this vegan air fried seitan recipe has plenty of.
Looking for Seitan? Try a vegan seitan recipe!
- Simple Seitan Fajitas
- 5 Ingredient Easy Vegan Chicken
- Vegan Meatballs (Beetballs)
- Simple Simmered Seitan Recipe for Stir Frying
- Tandoori Seitan Kabobs with Cucumber Yogurt Salad
- Stuffed Seitan Vegan Holiday Roast
- The Best Vegan Sausage Recipe: Seitan Sausage
How to Make BBQ Braised Air Fried Seitan
The ingredients in this seitan recipe are limited, but there are two cooking processes that need to be done. Firstly, we make a really simple seitan dough, and in small batches we cook that seitan in the air fryer for 5 minutes in small, 5 gram pieces. Depending on the size of your air fryer, you may have cook it in many batches, but be patient. If you over-fill the air fryer, they won’t have the space to cook properly, and will stick together. After the seitan is cooked, the second step is to braise the seitan in BBQ sauce, along with a bit of added sugar and water. Depending on how sweet your BBQ sauce is, you may or may not really need the extra sugar, so feel free to experiment here. The seitan will absorb some of the cooking liquid and soften, and some of the moisture will evaporate, until the remaining sauce becomes sticky and thick, at which point it’s time to eat!
BBQ-Braised Vegan Air Fried Seitan Recipe
Ingredients
- 1 cup vital wheat gluten
- 1 tbsp. miso paste
- 1 tbsp. soy sauce
- 1 tsp. garlic powder
- Oil, for cooking
- 2 cloves of garlic, minced
- ½ medium onion, sliced
- ½ cup of your favorite vegan BBQ sauce (plus more, if desired)
- 1 tbsp. brown sugar
Instructions
- Mix the vital wheat gluten, garlic powder, soy sauce and miso paste together in a bowl, slowly adding ½ cup of water until a stretchy, firm dough forms. Kneed for about one minute, then cut the dough into small pieces (about 5 grams, or between ½-1 tsp). Roll those pieces into small balls, and set aside.
- Preheat your air fryer to 375°F (190°C). Add the balls in small batches, and cook for 5 minutes. When they’re done, they should have blown up into spheres- don’t get too excited, sadly they will soon deflate. Set aside, and continue cooking the dough in batches until it is all gone.
- In a small bowl, combine the brown sugar and BBQ sauce with 1 cup of water and whisk together. Add a small amount of oil to a large skillet, and sauté the onions and garlic for about 2 minutes, or until fragrant. Add the seitan puffs, and the diluted BBQ sauce. On a medium heat, bring to a simmer and continue to cook, stirring often. Once most of the liquid has been absorbed by the seitan or evaporated, the sauce will become thicker and sticky. Remove from the heat and serve as is, or with additional BBQ sauce, as desired.
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I love this vegan seitan recipe, it looks super delicious!
Thanks for sharing with us!
Also, it is featured on my blog here: https://suzinspire.com/20-incredible-meat-free-recipes-you-should-try-this-summer/
If you like it, please share it on social media! Thank you so much!
Keep up the great work!
Thanks Suzie! We’ll definitely share your great looking post with our followers.