Explained: Wheat Gluten
Explained: Wheat Gluten (mian jin / 面筋)
I first came across Wheat Gluten in my local ma la tang (a spicy soup) restaurant. In ma la tang restaurants, customers order by first choosing their own ingredients from a refrigerated cabinet. It’s a lot of fun using metal tongs to pick up slices of potato, spinach leaves and tofu, adding them to your own bowl and then paying by weight. It’s even more fun wondering what a lot of the ingredients are. One of those that I came across early on in China was something that looked like a spongy but uncooked bread.
When I asked my Chinese friends what it was, some would say ‘a type of tofu’, others would say ‘bread’ and the food-savvy would utter ‘mian jin’. When I translated that on my phone I got ‘wheat gluten’. I’d never heard of such a thing, presumed the translation was wrong and that it was simply a type of Chinese bread. But it’s not.
So what is it exactly?
There are many types of wheat gluten. The most common is kao fu (烤麸), which looks like a loaf of pale focaccia, with big holes that are perfect for capturing sauces. Fried gluten (you mian jin 油面筋) are little balls that have been fried - the texture is puffier rather than spongy.
There are many ways to prepare wheat gluten to given it different texture. One version is to wrap the dough tightly into a sausage shape, then steam it. After that, it is pulled apart to resemble meat. This version is best known in the West as Seitan which is the Japanese name for wheat gluten. Kao fu dough is laid out into trays and steamed, cut and sold partially cooked.
How it is made?
Wheat gluten is made by washing a wheat flour dough over and over in water until all that’s left is the sticky gluten dough as the starch dissolves in the water. Eventually, after a lot of washing, the dough becomes coarser and springier with bits of sticky dough floating around in the water. At the final stage, it will all come together in a clump. This is then steamed, baked or broken into pieces and deep fried.
Chinese cooking is never one to throw away anything; the starchy water left over from washing the dough can be saved, steamed and turned into white slippery noodles known as liang pi (cold-skin noodles).
What to cook?
Wheat gluten is a really splendid ingredient that is not talked about enough: high in protein, low in fat and carbs, and perfect for those cleansing meat-free days we should all be having now and again. Tofu is everywhere in China, but wheat gluten absorbs much more flavour and has a great spongy bite.
Hong shao rou is perhaps one of the most famous Chinese meat dishes, slow-braised pork in a rich, glossy sauce. But the same method can be used to cook wheat gluten with some meaty mushrooms. In the South, that’s a pretty common dish, but in the North, we’re much more likely to toss liang pi and wheat gluten together in a summer salad of noodles, shredded cucumber, and a thick and spicy sesame sauce. But I prefer to drop the noodles and have a wheat gluten salad.
Another classic Northern dish is to barbecue skewers of the steamed sausage version of wheat gluten with cumin and chilli, somewhat like a vegetarian sausage. Other ways to use the denser versions of wheat gluten are to stir-fry it in place of pork or tofu, with greens.