I hope someone knows how to do this, I'm sure there is a way. I basically need a method for separating protein from various peas or beans. It's to make a meat substitute style food. I know how to separate gluten from flour to make seitan (I do so often) and thought must be way to do this with pulses.

A lot of veggie meat style products are a mix of soya, gluten (aka wheat protein / seitan) and pea protein (not including quorn since it's a fungus the swines reg' t'marked so no one else can grow it) so there has to be an easy way to extract the pea protein.

I guess it's like homemade tofu which in essence is the same, just soya bean protein extracted, where you make beans into soy milk, curdle milk, strain off soywhey and press the curd (and then deepfry if you have sense). Maybe if it's "sticky" like gluten you could use the seitan method (soak and wash dough etc etc) but getting powdered pulses precooking might be a pain.

Does anyone have experience of managing this? Maybe it's a strange thing to ask.......no wait it IS a strange thing to ask but there has to be someone who has tried this already.

Hmm...Not the easiest thing to do...
A quick bit of background...
I am a Chemist, so some of this may get a bit technical, but I will try and keep it simple.

You obviously have an idea how tofu is made, so using a similar process for peas and beans would be ideal. in the Tofu process I think the protein in the soy milk is denatured by heat, i.e its structure is chemically changed by the curdling process....
and the resulting curds are insoluble in water and so can be filtered out and and pressed...

now this is all a bit of guesswork from my end, and will end up being a pretty expensive way around, due to the need for alcohol.I would try this in very small scale to see if it works before lashing out on anything too expensive but.....
I am guessing you are going heat and mash the peas/beans to form a thick solution. I suspect that filtering, even at this point will lose some of the protein, but its worth trying anyway.
so perhaps filter this thick solution through muslin or other similar filtering apparatus. then take the resulting clarified solution and add alcohol ( cheap vodka would be what I would use..., as this can be heated later to remove the alcohol and leave as little taste behind as possible. I would try adding equal amounts of alcohol and the clarified solution, then increasing the amount of alcohol added to clarified solution, you are looking for a the solution to become (probably) cloudy.
at whatever proportion alcohol to strained pea juice this happens will determine how much alcohol you need to use.
the starting point of 50:50 is a guess it may be more , may be less, or may not actually work at all...if the proteins are mostly removed by filtering.
However if you do end up with a cloudy solution , g9ive it a good stir, leave to stand, then filter it. hopefully you should then end up with the stuff in the filter being the protein. you may need to warm. heat this to remove any leftover alcohol, but you may get lucky and it could all be in the liquid that went thru the filter....I guess sniff the resulting protein and take action based on whatever you think best

sorry its mostly guesswork, but hopefully it will help

that is the maddest request i have ever seen! are you just a bit bored or something?

i take it you are a vegetierian?

Very strange request.

Glad someone can provie you with an answer though as I haven't a clue.

I'm intreguied to know why you want to do it?

Thanks, make sense but cost effective is kind of part of it (theory is good though, background is boichem so understand where you coming from). Tofu process involves addition of something that causes it to come out of solution and then filter precipitate just as you suggested. Heat usually applied to either get the beans into milk or to speed up in some cases but many of best methods are cold extraction.

Hehehehe I'm not bored I just suspect there must be a simple way to extract it since it's used in so many veggie foods. The best are often gluten/soy/pea mix. I want to do it because to get a raw unflavoured but more balanced protein would be great. Soy alone isn't great (hence ranks so low on protein scale) as is full of glycine (hence it's name) and hard for body to extract it. So combo proteins would be ideal, suitable for vegan too unlike quorn as they add eggwhite to bind fungal hyphae and make muscle like texture. If it's a simple enough cheap process like tofu/gluten one then it would be easy to make a hybrid food after initial extraction before pressing. Cant be so different since veg food industry wouldn't bother.

I make a lot of my own stuff including seitan because there is no store bought equivalent and it's cheap. I know you can buy seitan but I wash more carb out leaving 99% gluten which makes difference, I press for longer and heat to denature to set it, deepfry 'till crispy to give it chewier texture (like dft compared to boiled tofu) and make it puff up, then rinse and soak in marinade to remove oil and soften crispy shell.

When it's done most people who usually hate that kind of thing like it, and large amount is dirt cheap and it doesn't take that much prep. It's the same stuff that chinese restraunts sell as veggie pork and mock duck but often it's ... and I can't eat it. Problem lies more in the processing side of things, it's too jelly like and often flavour isn't brilliant. I wouldn't eat the store bought stuff if I ate meat (I don't eat in now so that proves how bad it is), but I would eat the stuff I make by choice if I ate meat.

As for being a veggie yeah I turned to the darkside a long time back hehehe. Surely only veggies would bother doing this anyway.

If God didn't want us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?

we are made out of meat too

Wonder what human tastes like? Chicken probably. Maybe pork for the lard arses???

According to what we used to be told in school, in the days when we got educated proper, not like now, we were informed that the cannibals out in the Pacific used to call the explorers who visited "long pig" because, you guessed it Rude, they tasted like pork. How we got here from peas I don't know.

Cannibalism (from Caníbalis, the Spanish name of the allegedly cannibalistic Caribs[1]), also called anthropophagy, is the act or practice of humans eating the flesh of other humans (sometimes known as "long pig").[2]

The term "cannibalism" is also used in zoology to mean the act of any species consuming members of its own kind. The expression "cannibalization" is in addition used metaphorically outside of biological fields to refer to the reuse of parts or ideas or to situations such as when a company's assets eat into its other assets. This article is about human cannibalism.

Cannibalism has recently been both practiced and fiercely condemned in several wars, especially in Liberia[3] and Congo.[4] Today, the Korowai are one of very few tribes still believed to eat human flesh.[5][6] It is also still known to be practiced as a ritual and in war in various Melanesian tribes.[7]

Cannibalism was widespread in the past among humans throughout the world, continuing into the 19th century in some isolated South Pacific cultures. Neanderthals are believed to have practiced cannibalism.[8][9] Among modern humans it has been practiced by various groups.[10] In the past, it has been practiced by humans in Europe,[11][12] South America,[13] India,[14] New Zealand,[15] North America,[16] Australia ,[17] the Solomon Islands,[18] parts of West Africa[6] and Central Africa,[6] some of the islands of Polynesia,[6] New Guinea,[19] Sumatra,[6] and Fiji,[20] usually in rituals connected to tribal warfare.[citation needed] Fiji was once known as the 'Cannibal Isles'. Evidence of cannibalism has been found in the Chaco Canyon ruins of the Anasazi culture.[21]

The closely related practice of headhunting continued in Europe until the early 20th century in the Balkan Peninsula and to the end of the Middle Ages in Ireland and the Scottish Marches

And not even a mention of rugby team?????