I was lucky enough to recently try a new meat-substitute product dubbed “Pulled Oats” from a Finnish start-up company - http://www.goldandgreenfoods.com/. It is genuinely delicious and I look forward to the product becoming more widely available outside of Scandinavia.
I noticed that two of it’s primary ingredients (oats and pea protein) are the same as Huel’s. It got me thinking if I could make some “Pulled Huel” using Huel powder as the main ingredient. But how to cook it? I had an intuition that it could be prepared like seitan (a popular vegan/vegetarian meat-substitute, also known as Wheat Meat). Sure enough on the Gold and Greens website they mention “Our secret is to collide the pure, clean Nordic oats with some age old Asian production methods” - I am confident that they are referencing seitan production methods which have been around for 1,000’s of years.
There are plenty of recipes online for home-made seitan so I drew inspiration from a few of them and improvised a little bit. The results of my first attempt were quite satisfactory - the texture was very good and almost equivalent to texture of the Pulled Oats. The taste was awful because I put in too much garlic powder and vegetable stock. My next attempts will start from from scratch with Huel only and move on to other flavourings (may be inspired by the current Pulled Oats flavours).
Here’s my initial recipe - (it is a work in progress so feel free to try it out and post your experiences here):
Ingredients:
2 cups Huel powder (Unflavoured and Unsweetened, approx. 250g)
1 cup Water
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Add the water to the Huel powder in a mixing bowl. You may need a little less or a little more water. Mix them together until it is forming a dough. (Feel free to add common seitan additives at this stage, like garlic, soy sauce, onions etc.).
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Coat a surface (e.g. chopping board) with some kind of flour (I used rice protein, could probably use more Huel powder). Take the dough out of the mixing bowl in one piece and place it on the surface. Knead the dough - I used my hands but a rolling pin should work better. Once you have a really good dough/loaf formed, let it to sit for 5 - 10 minutes.
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Then add the dough to a large pot of water. Make sure the dough is covered with water. Heat the pot on a very low heat for 60+ minutes (until firm, thoroughly). You don’t want the water to bubble at any stage. I’d imagine if you could measure the temperature and keep it under body temperature (approx. 37 degrees Celsius) then it should still cook and not have an adverse affect on the nutrition.
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Leave to stand for 5 - 10 minutes. Using two forks - “pull” the loaf apart. Theoretically you could stop at this point and eat it as is. While I stupidly didn’t take any photographs of my adventure, this is very close to how it looked - http://static1.squarespace.com/static/51e2c6c2e4b053e5f004748c/t/5213d41de4b00cd5639dab6a/1377031198948/chilaquiles_step4.jpg.
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This step is anyone’s guess - I tried two ways to further cook it, I fried half of the Pulled Huel (in a little olive oil, coconut oil might have been better taste-wise) and I oven baked the other half (for approx. 12 minutes at 180 degrees, fan assisted). Oven baking yielded a better texture but it was probably a bit too dry - I will have to experiment further with the cooking times.
I could use a bit of help with experimenting here. I think if we find the right recipe and cooking method this could be an invaluable option for consuming Huel (there can be a good bite to it!). Getting some of the parameters wrong results in an awful waste of Huel so I’m being tentative with my own experimentation. Let me know what you think.
TL;DR - try making “seitan” with Huel powder instead of wheat gluten and you end up with a similar result, but it’s actually more like a new product called Pulled Oats.