Seitan, WTF, Acidic/Basic Water

I had a thought recently of ways to maybe make the workload of making wash the flour seitan

I have read adding baking soda to the washing water could make the starch more soluble. That, and using slightly more warm than room temp water can help, but one has to be very careful it is just slightly warm, otherwise the gluten gets too soft and easy to wash away.

I figured that if this didnt work for whatever reason, a little acidic water would do similar. Haven't looked into it yet though.

Has anyone done such a thing? Used acidic or basic water to maybe make washing the the flour a little quicker and less labor intensive?

My local Costco has great prices of 50lbs of flour, so I'd like to take advantage of that.

Unfortunately, it looks like you may have a competing loss of gluten by lowering the pH of your wash water as lower pH tends to increase solubility of the gluten.  This as a result might reduce final yield of your insoluble gluten complex desired for the seitan.  Probably worth trying on a a few small batches just to see if this plays out and worth testing citric vs acetic vs. ascorbic acids to observe for differences between them.  Good luck!

photo below from  https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Solubility-at-different-pH-values-Solubility-of-the-wheat-gluten-and-its-hydrolysate-at_fig4_305711852