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Candle Cafe’s Wheat Ball Heroes – and a Pita Pizza!

December 4th, 2014 3:41 pm by Kelly Garbato I’m pretty sure I don’t eat enough sandwiches. Or at least not compared to my high school years. I used to have a sammie a day, like clockwork, and now I’m lucky if I make one or two a month. Adulthood, man. (On the plus side, I eat so much pizza and ice cream that my mom would be appalled if she knew. IF ONLY.)

I decided to rectify this oversight with the Wheat Ball Heroes from Vegan Holiday Cooking – one of the last recipes I’ll try before finally getting around to a review! (Just in time for the holidays, yay!) The recipe involves making both your own wheat balls and marinara sauce from scratch, but seeing as I had a bunch of homemade sauce in the freezer, I took a bit of a shortcut there. fwiw, the Candle Cafe’s marinara sauce recipe looks pretty solid; I’m sure it’s delish.

As for the wheat balls, they’re really tasty, but also rather troublesome. They’re made of seitan (homemade, using the Simple Simmered Seitan recipe from Vegan on the Cheap!), fried onions and garlic, bread crumbs, and assorted seasonings. After mixing the batter in the food processor, it turns into a crumbly mixture, which you’re supposed to form into little balls and bake. The dough didn’t hold together quite as well as I hoped, even after adding a little extra oil and a splash of water. Some balls took multiple tries, and still imploded while in the oven. To wit: I bet this recipe would work even better for wheat crumbles: squeeze the dough into little, pebble-sized bits, bake or fry, and enjoy with pasta or in a “loose meat” sandwich, a la the Lanford Lunch Box.

Even so, the wheat balls are hella tasty; it was all I could do to keep myself from snacking on the extras while the Heroes took their turn in the oven. (Okay, I didn’t. Restrain myself, that is. BALLS!) You’re supposed to make these with baguette bread, but we had to settle for sliced whole grain. It worked well enough, though the bread dried out a little during baking; a slightly thinner sauce might help on this front. (Mine was really thick after simmering for most of the day.) We also tried the wheat balls on a pita pizza, which was just as good but gets bonus points for not being so ridiculously messy!
 Filed under Angel Ramos, daiya, Jorge Pineda, Joy Pierson, pizza, robin robertson, seitan, vegan food, vegan holiday cooking, vegan on the cheap, wheat balls

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