Italian Style Vegan Sausages (2024)

These plant based Italian style sausage are delicious, great in sandwiches or a main meal. Packed with fresh Italian herbs and a meat like taste.

This sausages are made from vital gluten. Are you gluten free? Check my Gluten Free Sausages Recipe!

Questa ricetta è disponibile anche in italiano.

Hello guys! I’m very very happy to share with you today the recipe of my ultimate Italian style sausages!
Finally all my experiments paid out, and I managed to put together a recipe that not only tastes amazing but it’s also very similar to what I remember Italian sausages taste like and am happy to share my Italian Style Vegan Sausages recipe.
I must say that it requires a bit of time, patience and skills, but on the bright side I can assure you that every drop of sweat and every second you put into making these is 100% worthy!

🌟 Why You'll Love This Recipe

The best bit is that they are indeed 100% homemade, meaning that you are in control of how much salt to add, and I haven’t added any extra grain into the mixture.
The mix of spices really work perfectly to balance the flavour.
The only salt we actually have is the one contained in the hummus (that you can easily make at home - I will also include my recipe below), in the mustard and in the liquid smoke and Worchester sauce.
Overall very very little, which is awesome, especially if we compare these homemade sausages to the store bought ones (full of salt and preservatives.. yuck!).

🗒️What you'll Need for this Recipe

• Vital wheat gluten. This protein flour is the main ingredient of these seitan sausages and helps achieving their “meaty texture”. Learn more about making seitan at home starting from humble flour in this post.
• Hummus. Both homemade and store-bought are fine. I prefer using a roasted pepper hummus for extra richness and flavour (I include the recipe for it below). Using another plant protein like in form of beans, tofu, powder or TVPs, helps making the seitan moister and tender, since pure seitan can be quite dry and rubbery on its own.
• Blend of sauces, spices and nutritional yeast.

🥑 Nutrition and Calories

Both gluten and hummus are ingredients rich on proteins. These sausages actually have more proteins than a meat one; to be precise almost three times as much as certain meat sausages (15.6gr VS 5 to 11gr).
Every sausage also has 112 kcal, 60% of our daily Vitamin K requirement, 1.3 grams of fibers, 8.3 of carbohydrates and 2 of fats (of which 0.6g omega-6).

🔪 How to Make Seitan Sausages

STEP 1

Combine 100 g of water (½ cup) with 1 tablespoon of liquid smoke and 1 tablespoon of vegan Worchester sauce.
This will be the liquid that we’re going to use to wet the gluten mixture once every other ingredient is combined (I used around 50 g of it (¼ cup), but it will depend on how “wet” is your hummus, that’s why I didn’t put any quantity in the list of ingredients). Set aside.

STEP 2

Finely chop the parsley with the garlic (alternatively you can grate the garlic). In a large bowl work all the ingredients together (apart from the water and, of course, the rice papers, that we are going to use later on as our sausages cases).

STEP 3

Pour as much water mixture as you need to achieve a “workable” dough (as mentioned before I used around 50 g).

STEP 4

Divide the dough into 8 (roughly 50 grams each) and shape each piece into a sausage.

STEP 5

Run one sheet of rice paper at a time under cold water to soften it up, place on a chopping board and cut it in two with a sharp knife.
Wrap each sausage in the half rice paper sheet making sure to cut out the excess for a nicer finish (you will need to be extra careful working with these sheets as they are very sticky and they can easily get stuck together turning themselves into a BLOB - alternatively you can wrap the sausages in foil, and remove it before frying).

STEP 6

Set up a steamer over a pot of water and bring the water to a boil. Align the sausages in the steamer making sure they are not touching each other. Steam for 20 minutes, then allow to cool down completely.
Once you're ready to serve, simply heat a pan with a little olive oil and fry the sausages for 5 minutes, until caramelised and uniform.

🍛Where to Use

• Grill the sausages and serve in a bun, hot dog style, or with a simple side salad.
• Fry and serve with mashed or roasted potatoes and vegan gravy.
• Cut into thick slices or small chunks and feature in stews, soups or pasta dishes.
• Crumble or slice and use as a pizza topping or pita bread filling.

👩🏻‍🍳 Useful Tips and Storage

Steaming Tips:you need to steam the seitan sausages before using them. I recommend getting a bamboo or stainless steal steaming basket, especiallyif you're planning to make seitan based dishes often. Alternatively you can use an Instant Pot or any other pressure cooker with its steaming rack and set "pressure cook" mode for 10 minutes.

How to Store: homemade vegan sausages can be stored in an air-tight container for max a week after steaming. Avoid overlapping the sausages to prevent the rice paper wrapping to stick one another.

Freezing Tips:once cooled completely in the fridge, transfer them to an air-tight freezer container and store in the freezer for 2-3 months. Before using, allow them to thaw completely and then cook them as you like.

📖Recipe

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