How Is Wheat Gluten Made?

Wheat gluten is commonly known as seitan here in the United States and is a wheat derivative food made from separating the gluten from wheat flour. Wheat gluten is widely used in East and Southeast Asian nations as an alternative to meat, or meat substitute.

Here in the US it is used in various industries both as a filler product to add protein and texture to processed foods (such as ketchup and even ice cream), as a meat substitute with similar properties as tofu, as a pet food meat substitute and many other uses from shampoo to biodegradable sporks. The US is by far the leading worldwide consumer of wheat gluten.

The processing of wheat into wheat gluten is fairly simple. The wheat is ground into a fine meal or flour and then kneaded into a dough. It is repeatedly washed in order to flush away the starch. This process is repeated over and over again until what remains is merely the "gluten." This gluten has a very sticky and visco-elastic property to it - think of bubble gum (in fact, gluten is a key ingredient in chewing gum.)

There are lots of very technical and chemical processing explanations of how wheat gluten is made that, if you are a chemist, might be more interesting, but to most would be far too much detail.

In essence, the process of making wheat gluten really is this simple. You start with wheat, make it into a paste, knead it and repeatedly "wash" or remove the starch from the mixture creating a chemical separation process that yields the gluten byproduct.

What is odd is that the US is by far the largest exporter of wheat - we shipped more than 1 billion bushels of wheat overseas in the 2006 growing season alone - yet the US imports more than 80% of the gluten used in our industries. So how is it that we are the largest producer of wheat and yet the largest importer of gluten? The fact is that we have very few US companies that do the processing for gluten creation and so we largely rely on importing gluten from European Union countries.

This elastic property of gluten is exactly what manufactures desire. It creates a texture and a crispness that is used in processed meats such as chicken nuggets, faux crab meat, pulled pork sandwich meat, and most all frozen meat patty meals (which use a lot of filler products.) As a filler product it is desirable not only for its texture, but also for its protein value.

Wheat gluten is also used extensively in doughs and bakery flours and goods to ensure that the dough remains intact as it rises. Hopefully in the future the US will expand domestic production of gluten so that we can control quality and not have further contamination issues that hit the pet industry a few months ago from imported Chinese contaminated gluten.