Wheat Meat (Don't be scared)

Ok I know the very name wheat meat can make a person cringe. That is what I thought too but hopefully you will be as surprised as I was by the reality. It was really good! I'm not saying all wheat meat is good, but this recipe definitely was. This is going to be a long post so please bear with me. :)

I've been wanting to try wheat meat for some time because the reality is, no matter how much meat you store, you will eventually run out. I was HIGHLY skeptical of wheat meat but I knew I had to at least try it. Plus, my new favorite food storage book (A Bite of Independence Through Self-Sufficiency)has a whole chapter raving about it and since I pretty much trust that book with my life now.....

There were different recipes depending on what you wanted to make: chicken, ground beef, hamburgers, hot dogs, etc. I decided to make meatballs for our spaghetti, and hamburger patties for dinner later in the week. That is all I've tried so far so those are the recipes I'll post on my recipe link.

Let me just say that IT..............WAS..................AWESOME! First I made the meatballs and served them with spaghetti. You seriously could NOT tell it wasn't real meat. It looked like meat, tasted like meat, had the consistency of meat. And the ultimate test - my kids gobbled them up!

Two days later we had our "hamburgers." I didn't tell anyone that they were not real. I even barbecued them on our grill! I accidentally made the patties bigger than the buns so I had to cut off the edges, leaving a lot of pieces of "meat" on the serving platter.

Not one of my kids realized that the burgers weren't real. They gobbled them down and then asked if they could have the leftover "meat" on the platter. I just smiled and said, "Sure." They gobbled that down too, leaving only scraps.

My husband did catch on. He thought they were real burgers until he bit into one and then he realized they were not real meat BUT he still liked them and ate the whole thing. This could be because he eats more real food than the rest of us since he works at the Fire Station several times a week and eats there.

We also had some friends come over later in the evening and when we told them what we had for dinner (people CONSTANTLY ask me what we've eaten that day - probably just morbid curiosity) they wanted to try some. I was reticent since all there was left was the little scraps that had long since grown cold. Still they tried it, and THEY LIKED IT TOO! They couldn't believe it was made out of wheat. In fact one of them said, "Hey, it tastes like chicken!" LOL

One side benefit I was not aware of, is that a byproduct of making wheat meat is bran. I made approximately 2 lbs of wheat meat and ended up with about 2 cups of bran left over. So, I made bran muffins which my kids LOVED. Out of 2 dozen I could barely keep one aside so that my husband could try it when he got back from work.

I'll post the recipe for making the wheat meat but here are a few basics. Wheat meat is made entirely from wheat. The bran and starch is washed out of the wheat and you are left with the gluten. Gluten loves to take on the taste of what is around it but it also absorbs liquid so you want to be careful not to add it to your dishes too early. It needs to be added last or it will take on too much moisture and lose it's meat-like texture.

For my recipe I used 10 cups of freshly ground wheat flour and it made approximately 2 lbs of "meat" and 2 cups of bran. Once you have your gluten prepared (don't worry - it's SO easy!) then you bake it. It looks like large rolls. I then ran the rolls through a meat grinder. You can use a food processor as well but the consistency won't be quite the same as meat. The key here is to trick your brain into thinking what you are eating is really meat so you want the consistency and taste to be as close as possible.

Anyway, I ground up the rolls into ground "meat" (man I'm getting tired of using quotations marks! :) ) and then I added seasoning to give it the flavor of what I was making, which was meatballs and hamburger patties. I then shaped them how I wanted and baked them one more time. It is VERY important not to over bake. Better to bake it a little too short, than a little too long. Also, this recipe calls for eggs to be used to bind the wheat into patties. I didn't try it with powdered eggs because I store fresh eggs for stuff like this. I don't know if it would work with powdered but I do know it will work if you use just the whites of the eggs and not the yolks.

I served the meatballs right away while they were still warm in the spaghetti. The hamburgers patties I kept in the fridge for a couple of days. I threw them on the grill just long enough to reheat them. Both were a hit with my family. Going to try to make chicken next. It's a different process but supposedly I can even use it to make chicken nuggets! What 3 year old wouldn't be happy about that?

Finally, on a nutritional note. Wheat meat contains NO cholesterol, and has 1/3 fewer calories than hamburger. In fact the only thing keeping wheat meat from being considered a complete protein is that is lacks the amino acid Lysine, which can be resolved by using eggs to prepare it. Plus I'm sure you've already guess how much cheaper it is than meat. Of course we aren't all going to give up meat but if you ever do have to, you can at least feel good about the nutrition, and economical value, of wheat meat.