Homemade Seitan Sausages
These seitan sausages are salty, savoury and extremely delicious. These vegan sausages are perfect to use for just about any dish. From hearty breakfast sausages to salty bites to accompany a filling pasta, these deliver maximum flavour every time.
Sausages might just about be the perfect savoury snack. Nothing quite beats these flavourful vegan treats to deliver a compact burst of deliciousness. I love any food that you can grab and munch on the go. I always have been a sucker for a sausage sandwich or sausage role. Finger food at it’s finest.
There’s something so comforting about homemade seitan sausages. Sure you can buy plenty of pre-made vegan sausages at the supermarket, but making them at home feels just so much better. I’ve grown weirdly fond of wrapping endless amounts of seitan logs ready for the oven. It feels like an event, kinda like those classic movie scenes of italian mob households prepping some elaborate feast!
The clear advantage of making these sausages at home over store-bought variety is twofold. Firstly you know what’s gone into them – just wholefood goodness. None of those bizarre additives that a lot of brands seem to add these days. Secondly you don’t have to contend with a weird vegan sausage casing. Pre-made vegan sausages seem to all choose the same brand/type of sausage casing and it always tastes plasticky and disgusting. My homemade seitan sausages don’t need any casing, they stick together just fine. Homemade for the win!
How to make seitan sausages
Making seitan sausages is frankly pretty easy, it’s just a bit time consuming. The key ingredient is, of course, vital wheat gluten. This protein flour is magic and helps give the seitan sausages their “meaty texture”. If you’ve got vital wheat gluten in the pantry making seitan sausages is a 3 step process.
First you need to flavour your wheat gluten with some spices and ingredients. You need some moisture to help bind the wheat gluten together so it’s best to flavour the vital wheat gluten with something that already has a little flavour. In this recipe I’ve used soy sauce, miso paste, onion, garlic, tomato paste and olive oil to bind and flavour the wheat gluten but you can use lots of other ingredients. Some other wet ingredients you can help bind the wheat gluten with are: stock/broth, liquid smoke, wine, chickpeas, beans, and lot’s more. See the seitan sausage variants section below for more ideas on how to change up flavouring your sausages.
After binding your wheat gluten with some flavourful ingredients it’s time to shape your vegan sausages. If you’re not familiar with this process it can be a little time consuming. As you make more seitan sausages you’ll get quicker until you can wrap sausages in your sleep. The technique involves wrapping seitan dough in baking parchment and then kitchen foil until you have a nice tight package. This retains the moisture whilst cooking and essentially steams the dough from the inside.
Once you’ve wrapped your sausages now you can throw them into the oven. Lots of people also steam their sausages as well. I find steaming works well but requires you to have a little bit more equipment in the kitchen. My preference is to bake the sausages as this also helps to crisp the exterior of the sausage, which is closer to the actual texture of a sausage.
Delicious seitan sausage variants
This recipe for seitan sausages uses lots of spices and ingredients to create a wonderfully tasty and versatile sausage. However, sometimes you might want a seitan sausage that gives you a bit more bold flavour. Don’t worry you can modify this original recipe to accommodate many fan favourites. See the list below for more info:
- Chorizo Seitan Sausages – add 150ml red wine and a further tablespoon of tomato paste to the wet ingredients and 1 tablespoon of smoked paprika, 1 tsp red pepper flakes, and 100g more of vital wheat gluten to the dry ingredients.
- Apple & Sage Seitan Sausages – remove 1/2 of the chopped onion from the wet ingredients and substitute for 1/2 a diced granny smith apple. Add 5g of chopped sage to the dry ingredients.
- Spicy Seitan Sausages – Add 1 chopped red chilli to the wet ingredients and 1 tsp of dried chilli flakes to the dry ingredients.
Seitan sausage FAQs
What is seitan?
Seitan is a vegan the term given to a food made predominantly from wheat gluten. Wheat gluten is the main protein of wheat and is made by washing regular flour to remove any starch. When cooked seitan has a surprisingly “meaty” texture and is very easy to mould into different shapes and sizes. This makes it perfect to make vegan and vegetarian meat substitute dishes.
What is vegan sausage casing made of?
Commercial vegan sausage casing are normally made of a blend of carbohydrates similar to cellulose. My recipe for seitan sausages doesn’t require you to use any kind of sausage casing.
How can I make a healthy seitan sausage?
In general seitan sausage is pretty damn healthy. They’re packed full of protein, just two sausage will give you a whopping 38g of protein. Furthermore there’s no weird over-processed ingredients in the sausages. If you are looking to make them even healthier you can make an oil free version of these seitan sausages by omitting the olive oil and substituting for water. They will stick a little bit more to the parchment paper so be careful when unravelling them.
I want more like this recipe…
You’re in luck, I’ve got plenty of delicious vegan recipes on this site. Here’s some recipes which are similar to this seitan sausage recipe:
Homemade Seitan Sausages
This meal is around 95% less polluting than the average UK meal.
Eating this recipe will save around 2.78 KG CO2e per person.
That’s equivalent to the emissions produced driving 22.99 KM in a modern car.
How do I calculate this?Ingredients
Dry Ingredients
- 250 g Vital Wheat Gluten
- 30 g Nutritional Yeast
- 1 Teaspoon Paprika
- 2 Teaspoons Fennel Seeds (ground into a rough powder using a pestle and mortar)
- 1 Teaspoon Freshly ground black pepper
- 185 g Long Grained Rice (dry weight, rinsed and cooked to packet instructions)
- 1 Teaspoon Fine Sea Salt
Wet Ingredients
- 1 Medium Onion (diced)
- 4 Cloves Garlic (roughly chopped)
- 2 Tablespoons Soy Sauce
- 1 Tablespoon Miso Paste (any variety will do)
- 1 Tablespoon Tomato Paste
- 2 Tablespoons Olive Oil
Instructions
- Preheat your oven to 160˚c (fan oven).
- Place all of the wet ingredients into a food processor and blitz into a chunky slurry.
- Place all of the dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl and combine well.
- Pour the slurry into the mixing bowl. Using your hands combine the slurry with the dry ingredients until incorporated into a shaggy dough. Knead the dough against the side of the mixing bowl to ensure that no dry ingredients are left behind.
- Cut out 4 equal lengths of baking parchment, measuring 37.5cm/15inch x 15cm/6inch in size. Now divide these four lengths into 3 equal rectangles, which should measure 12.5/5inch x 15cm/6inch. Once finished you should have 12 equal rectangles of baking parchment. (If you want to save some time wrapping you sausages you can make longer sausages sticking with the original 37.5cm x 15cm lengths. Follow the rest of the recipe but at the end you'll have 4 large and long sausages instead of 12 smaller ones. This will be much quicker but you'll have to cut the larger sausage into smaller individual sausages after cooking. This sacrifices some of the aesthetics of the sausages as the individual sausages won't have defined "ends".)
- Now take a portion of seitan dough and shape it into a rough sausage in your hand. You want enough dough so that you can make a sausage that is about 4cm/1.5inch thick and can cover the length of one your baking parchment rectangles leaving 2.5cm/1inch either side.
- Place the dough onto one of the parchment rectangles and roll up tightly so that the parchment completely covers the dough. Then twist either end of the parchment so that the dough is sealed in and is nice and tight against the paper. The finished wrapping should look like a large sweet/candy wrapper. Repeat this process until all of the seitan dough has been used up.
- Now arrange the wrapped seitan sausages onto a sheet of kitchen foil and fold the foil over the entire group until all the sausages are covered. Crimp any sides of the foil so that wrapped sausages are completely covered by the foil.
- Place your foiled sausages onto a baking tray and place into the oven for 1 hour. Flip the sausages halfway through cooking.
- remove the sausages from the oven and allow to cool for a bit until unwrapping each sausage. These sausages will firm up as they cool and have the best texture after about 30 minutes.
- These sausages can be eaten with just the baking in the oven but they taste best with additional frying. Heat a little oil in a frying pan over a medium high heat and toss in a few sausages. Fry the sausages for about 3-5 minutes turning halfway through so they get a nice crips brown exterior.
21 Comments
Zoe
September 29, 2021 at 5:29 pm
Hi, I’ve made sausages using your recipe. Haven’t tried then yet but they look delicious. How do I store them? Will they freeze? Thanks in advance.
hugo
September 30, 2021 at 7:25 am
Hi Zoé, these sausages will store in the fridge for up to 7 days. They can also be frozen and and de thawed in the fridge or just popped into soups/casseroles directly.
Annie
March 5, 2022 at 11:19 pm
What can I substitute for the rice? I live on my own and have no fridge, so cooking 30 g of rice for the recipe puts it into the “more trouble than it’s worth” category.
Good to find a vegan food blog that isn’t USAnian 🌞
hugo
March 8, 2022 at 9:37 am
Hey Annie, I would recommend using any kind of grain you have available. E.g. bulghur wheat, barley, e.t.c. The grain is key to giving the sausages a really nice texture!
Fred
March 11, 2022 at 12:50 am
Sorry to ask, but since english is not my first language…
For the rice is it 185 g before or after cooking ?
thanks
hugo
March 11, 2022 at 9:19 am
Hi Fred, It’s 185g dry weight (before cooking).
Rebecca Sanchez
March 19, 2022 at 3:32 pm
Holy smokes – this recipe is sheer perfection! Only mod I made was to add the cooked rice in the wet and purée it in my Vitamix with the other wet ingredients! My husband has been a vegan for nearly 40 years and he loved these as brats with beet, grilled onions and condiments!
hugo
March 19, 2022 at 3:42 pm
Lovely to hear you and your husband enjoyed these Rebecca. That meal sounds delish!!
Fred
March 21, 2022 at 8:50 pm
Really delicious and the texture is perfect ( often tricky with seitan to have the correct texture)
I made no substitution to the recipe except to put the rice in wet ingredients.
We served the sausages with a mushroom sauce and mashed potatoes and it was really good
Thanks a lot for the recipe!
hugo
March 22, 2022 at 9:23 am
Nice Fred, so glad you enjoyed them. Sausage and mash is the best!
Juan
August 3, 2022 at 2:40 pm
this sounds very interesting and I will give it a try soon. Is there any way to replace parchment paper with these, maybe greasing the aluminum / tin foil? its kidna hard to get where I live.
hugo
August 7, 2022 at 4:40 pm
Hi Juan, I haven’t tried without the parchment paper, so I’m not sure how this would turn out. If you do give it a go, please let me know how it went. Thanks.
Juan
August 13, 2022 at 3:56 pm
hi, since i had some leftover breadcrumb, (“authentic Japanese Panko” some relatives brought) i subbed this instead of rice on the dry ingredients. And was out of fennel seeds so used some cajun seasoning .
Instead of using parchment I just greased aluminum foil or tin foil and wrapped each sausage and baked just as indicated here. The texture and taste were just spot on, obviously the Cajun seasoning gave it an extra kick (I normally always taste anything before cooking anyway)
so yes if its hard to get parchment you can just grease the foil using any oil, wrap the sausages just like you would in step 7 and it will be just alright, so maybe you could update the recipe.
Note: I have made these two times now, the second time I just went a bit overboard with the wet ingredients so adding just a wee bit of cornstarch to the overall mix will help get consistency, shape and firmness again (even after baking)
Wish I could post a pic of my first ones.
I also think if you add liquid smoke when frying them or when mixing them to reheat beans and so on that it really gets 90% close to the actual sausage flavor and I think easily passes by as a regular sausage 🙂
I did this and even the non-vegan carnivore friends I have were totally surprised and liked them!
so thanks a lot for this recipe, its kinda my favorite way to really boost protein intake with gluten. SO versatile for every meal, plus you do KNOW what exactly goes inside the stuff you are eating.
Annie
August 11, 2022 at 2:29 am
Hi Hugo
I live on a boat, and can’t use scales. I know it’s a big ask, but can you add metric cup units to your recipes along with grams? Usually, I know what they are, but even on Google it’s hard to find conversions for vital wheat gluten and nutritional yeast.
hugo
August 11, 2022 at 8:17 am
Hey Annie, sorry I don’t have the conversions at the moment. I’ll try and add them when I get a chance. In the meantime, I’d recommend checking this link for standard vegan conversion metrics: https://www.elephantasticvegan.com/conversion-ingredients-cup-grams/ .
Freda Keranu
September 12, 2022 at 12:08 pm
I found your recipes great and am looking forward to making my own vegetarian loaf from scratch….. no more buying expensive gluten flour for me….great recipes too… keep up the fab job!
hugo
October 22, 2022 at 8:30 am
So kind Freda
Ninchen
October 2, 2022 at 6:05 pm
I just made the sausages and they are super and the recipe itself is easy to prepare. Thank you.
hugo
October 22, 2022 at 8:30 am
Amazing, thanks Ninchen
Susan
July 25, 2023 at 5:58 pm
Thanks for this recipe,I was looking for a seitan recipe that didn’t involve steaming as I’m not able to do this at the moment. Really pleased how it turned out, thank you very much
Lucas
November 23, 2023 at 9:05 am
Do you cook the rice or let it cook during the cooking process of the sausage?