food

Washed flour seitan is a PITA. There must be a way to make it easier to prepare large batches.

As I see it there are are 2 main issues:

1. It is labourous to massage the dough, particularly in large quantities
2. Significant volumes of water involved make it messy and space consuming, especially if saving starch

Optimising (1) involves using more water, like you could just hose some dough on a grating for ages.

Optimising (2) means more manual work.

There seem to be the following avenues for improvement:

1. Improved tools for washing the dough
2. Automatic water circulation
3. Automatic reclaiming of water to reduce the volume needed

Looking into patents industrial processes do not seem directly translatable to the home, involving heavy and multi-stage machinery.

My thoughts at this stage:

1. stand mixer + automatic water circulation with cheap diagraphram pumps. Uses a large volume of water to be settled. High volume stand mixers are expensive, there is the potential for a lot of messy splashing.
2. Using a posser and a big bucket. Manual but cheap.
3. Water circulation + using a modified paint roller to push the dough against a grating. Maybe cheap but still less labour intensive?

Weird pipe dream shit:

1. Could you use something like a sluice to settle the starch and recycle the water. Essentially trading speed for just washing it for ages while you go and do something else?
2. Some sort of cyclonic separation to reclaim the water from the starch as above?
3. Is there an easy way to make some sort of food safe low velocity mega stand mixer from common salvaged tools?

I would appreciate any insight or constructive criticism from the more mechanically minded, or people who know how peasants did this shit without going mad.