anunrefinedvegan

There was a time when I could not pass up the cocktail wiener, the Vienna sausage, the “pigs” snuggled into biscuity blankets.  It was as much their diminutive size as their flavor – I mean, Vienna sausage??  Yikes.  Scary stuff even during the height of my carnivorous days.  Post-meat, the allure of the dainty sausage remained and when I opened the current issue of KAF’s The Baking Sheet and saw a recipe for wee hot dogs in biscuit dough, I had to give it a vegan go.  What I miss about sausage isn’t the meat, it’s the flavor – for which the spices are mainly responsible.  Seitan sausage has flavor to beat the band, so adapting this recipe was easy-peasy.  I added a touch of mustard and sweet, soft caramelized onions.

Save-the-Piggies-in-a-Blanket
Makes 18

Filling:
your favorite vegan sausage, 18 small “links”
~1/2 cup caramelized onions
your favorite mustard

Dough:
1 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 cup AP flour
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
1/4 cup vegan “butter”
3/4 “buttermilk” (soy milk + apple cider vinegar or lemon juice)

About the sausage:
I cooked up a batch of my Smokey Apple-Sage Seitan Sausage and after it spent the night in the refrigerator, I cut the sausages down the middle, then I cut each half in quarters so that I had “links” about 3″ long.  Certainly a commercial vegan sausage could happily be employed for this recipe.  Oh – and I think a spicy seitan would be outstanding here… Anyway, once you cut the sausages, set them aside until you’re ready for the assembly line.

Make the biscuit dough:
Preheat the oven to 400F and line a baking pan with parchment.

In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together the flours, salt, baking soda and baking powder.  Cut the “butter” into the dough until it’s more or less incorporated – like coarse meal – and then pour in the “buttermilk.”  Mix until you have a firm dough.

On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough out until it’s about 1/4″ thick.  And here I used a ruler: you’re going to cut the dough into 3 1/2″ pieces.  Cut strips of dough that are 2″ wide and 10 1/2″ long – then cut those strips into thirds (to get the 3 1/2″ pieces).  I trimmed the ragged edges of the dough before measuring.  Smear a little bit of mustard onto each piece, then place caramelized onion on top of the mustard.  With a wet brush, dampen one end of each piece.  Now get your seitan sausage “links” and roll one up in each piece of dough, pressing to seal the edges.  You can brush the tops with soy milk if you like.

Bake for 15-20 minutes and serve while warm.  The original recipe suggests serving these with chutney – which sounds pretty darn good – much better than catsup.  They also suggest they’d be good alongside scrambled eggs, which of course, in our case would mean scrambled tofu.