Making pasta with gluten : possible?

Hi everyone,
I'm getting quite good now at making Seitan (gluten based recipie).
I wondered if any of you ever tried making pasta out of a gluten loaf.
The consistance of the loaf (wich is what you obtain just before you
cook it to meke seitan) is quite sponge-with-latex, if you know what I mean.
And I wanted to try it with a manual machine that italian use to make
fresh pasta. But I would want to buy a machine if I can't do what I want
with it.

Thanks
Huey

Hueyduck wrote:
Hi everyone,
I'm getting quite good now at making Seitan (gluten based recipie).
I wondered if any of you ever tried making pasta out of a gluten loaf.
The consistance of the loaf (wich is what you obtain just before you
cook it to meke seitan) is quite sponge-with-latex, if you know what
I mean. And I wanted to try it with a manual machine that italian use
to make
fresh pasta. But I would want to buy a machine if I can't do what I
want with it.

Do you mean using the kneading rollers on the machine to flatten and thin
out the loaf, and then using the cutting rollers on the machine to slice it
up into strings? I've never worked with gluten, but I've worked quite a bit
with fresh pasta, and from your description of the gluten loaf I don't think
this will work. Pasta dough is very soft, and even on the widest setting
the rollers on the machine are very close together. If you could even get
the loaf through the kneading rollers it would probably just spring back to
close to its original shape. The cutting rollers probably couldn't cut
something as tough as you describe the gluten loaf either.

As I say, I've never worked with gluten so take all of this with a grain of
salt. Is there someone you can borrow a pasta machine from to try it out?
At any rate, you might be better off just shredding the loaf with a knife.

--
carla
http://geekofalltrades.typepad.com/geek

carla wrote:

Do you mean using the kneading rollers on the machine to flatten and thin
out the loaf, and then using the cutting rollers on the machine to slice it
up into strings?
That's exactly what I meant.
I've never worked with gluten, but I've worked quite a bit
with fresh pasta, and from your description of the gluten loaf I don't think
this will work. Pasta dough is very soft, and even on the widest setting
the rollers on the machine are very close together. If you could even get
the loaf through the kneading rollers it would probably just spring back to
close to its original shape. The cutting rollers probably couldn't cut
something as tough as you describe the gluten loaf either.

I think you are right. Springy (is that a word) is a word that defines
perfecly a gluten loaf.

Is there someone you can borrow a pasta machine from to try it out?
I could ask. But I wouldn't like to break the machine with too tough a
texture.
At any rate, you might be better off just shredding the loaf with a knife.

I tried this this afternoon. Even this doeasn't work. :-(
Anyway I ended up deep-frying little bits of gluten, just to try it out.
It works perfectly.
If you boil it first and then fry it, it hives crispy little things.
Boiled gluten doesn't absorb much oil, so it can make great snacks.
If you deep fry rax gluten, it will have an other textu a bit like a
very light doughnut (donut?). I tried this last one with a bit of
aspartam powder on it (yeeeeerk, I know, but we still don't have splenda
here in France). It was quite good.

A piece of advice: If you fry seitan (gluten cooked with garlic, Tamari
sauce and a bit of ginger), you will get something that's
extraordinarily close to potatoe bits. Incredible. Even the taste is
quite similar.

ANyhow, never forget that gluten is pure protein, but is not usable by
the body if you don't add proteines that contains lysin.
So don't forget to drink a small glass of soja drink when you have a
gluten based meal.


Huey

Hueyduck wrote:

Hi everyone,
I'm getting quite good now at making Seitan (gluten based recipie).
I wondered if any of you ever tried making pasta out of a gluten loaf.
The consistance of the loaf (wich is what you obtain just before you
cook it to meke seitan) is quite sponge-with-latex, if you know what I
mean.
And I wanted to try it with a manual machine that italian use to make
fresh pasta. But I would want to buy a machine if I can't do what I want
with it.

I have a muscle-powered pasta machine (from Lehmans'). But before I got
it, we experimented with making pasta manually.

Basically, we rolled dough out to as thin as possible, cut it into
strips, then hung them to dry. We couldn't get it rolled as well as the
machine does, so it took a bit longer to dry, and needed a bit more
cooking than the stuff we make with the machine, but the manual method
worked.

I would suggest trying that before investing in a pasta machine so you
can get a feel for whateher it works.

My concern would have to do with how you make the seitan to begin with.
When making pasta, we use a high-gluten flour, but work it as little
as possible so the gluten doesn't toughen before rolling out the pasta.
If you work the flour a lot in extracting the gluten, I think it'd be
too tough to make pasta out of.