Vegan egg alternatives.

Egg Replacer and Vegan Egg Substitutes

If you wish to avoid eggs, you can choose from a number of excellent vegan egg alternatives. There are plant-based egg substitutes appropriate for every sort of recipe. The products featured here deliver fantastic flavor and texture.

The Evolution of Vegan Eggs

The art of baking has evolved for hundreds and hundreds of years. And for nearly all of that time, people have relied on eggs to add moisture and to bind dry ingredients. Eggs have been an essential baking ingredient for centuries, for which there was no satisfactory replacement. Until recently, there was no such thing as egg replacer.

The word vegan wasn’t coined until 1944, and the concept didn’t begin to go mainstream until the 1990s. So it’s fair to say that, when it comes to baking, eggs had a 500-year head start over vegan alternatives. The first attempts to replace eggs were primitive and, for many uses, yielded unimpressive results.

People would mash up tofu, apples, baked pumpkin, or bananas, and use them in place of eggs. While this can deliver the moistness that eggs provide, none of these foods have anything resembling the flavor of eggs. Nor do they deliver the binding properties that makes eggs among the most common baking ingredients. The absence of quality egg substitutes doubtless contributed to giving vegan cooking a bad reputation in the 1970s and 1980s.

JUST Eggs with Tofurky vegan sausage
Some JUST Egg vegan scrambled eggs accompanied by sliced Tofurky sausage.

Vegan Egg Alternatives

Today, everything is different. Avoiding eggs no longer requires sacrificing flavor or texture.  Many of today’s vegan egg substitutes are superb and remarkably versatile. You can use these products to make dishes like omelets, French toast, and scrambled eggs:

Here’s a review from TheTakeout.com featuring the JUST, Hodo, and Simply Eggless products.

Also, keep an eye out for the EVERY Egg, which is made using a cutting-edge technology called precision fermentation. It’s not yet in retail distribution, but is certainly a product for egg lovers to keep tabs on.

Vegan Recipes that Mimic Eggs

You can also make eggy dishes right in your kitchen, using easy-to-find vegan ingredients. Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s cookbook Vegan Brunch features a number of veganized egg-based breakfast recipes including omelettes, scrambles, and French toast.

Your basic tofu scramble offers another easy and delicious alternative to scrambled eggs. It won’t fool anyone into thinking it’s actually egg, but it’s delicious in its own right and among the most protein-rich meals available.

For more egg alternatives, see this excellent vegan egg coverage published by the BBC in 2022.

scrambled tofu
A super high protein vegan breakfast of scrambled tofu, black bean refrieds, and garlic bread.

Egg Replacers for Baking

Now we get into an unusual category: egg replacer. The term egg replacer may seem too obvious to merit explanation, but it can in fact create confusion. Counter-intuitively, egg replacer is not a substitute for whole eggs, so forget about using it to make vegan scrambled eggs, omelets, or flan. Instead, egg replacer is simply intended to provide the binding properties needed for foods like cakes, muffins, and pancakes.

You can make an inexpensive egg replacer yourself simply by mixing some finely-ground flax seeds together with water. Whisk together one tablespoon ground flax and three tablespoons water until the texture becomes gelatinous. You’ll then have the baking equivalent of one egg.

Note that using flax as a vegan egg substitute may yield disappointing results. The quality of your results will vary by recipe. While flax gives you the binding qualities delivered by an egg, it doesn’t provide the fluffiness.

If you’re seeking a light and airy texture, consider purchasing an egg replacer product. There are several popular brands:

All these products come in powder form. The package will instruct you on the amount of powder and water to mix together to replace one egg. The magic ingredients used by these products to replicate egg’s binding properties is tapioca flour and potato starch.

The Neat Egg has a different formulation which bypasses those ingredients in favor of ground up chia seeds and garbanzo beans. Since this product’s main ingredient chia, it contains a significant amount of beneficial omega 3 fatty acids.

It’s fair to say that egg replacer powders were indispensable back when only a few vegan cookbooks existed. But today, countless vegan titles focus on egg-free baking. Given the wealth of terrific vegan baking recipes available today, egg replacer is no longer a mandatory pantry item for vegans.

Aquafaba

Anyone serious about vegan baking should know about aquafaba, which was dreamed up by some mad kitchen genius and caught on widely around 2015. Aquafaba can do things that egg replacer powders can’t. Most notably you can use aquafaba to make soufflé, angel food cake, and a killer lemon meringue pie.

What is aquafaba? If you’ve ever boiled dried beans, you’ve probably had the cooking water foam up, perhaps even uncontrollably, during cooking. If so, you’ve already unwittingly created aquafaba’s sole ingredient. All you need to do is remove some of this foamy bean water, cook it down a little, and whip it up. The stuff delivers a level of moistness and binding that takes egg replacements to the next level. Here are complete instructions for making it at home.

Aquafaba has attracted a cult of vegan cooking enthusiasts, and has even spawned a popular cookbook: Zsu Dever’s Aquafaba: Sweet and Savory Vegan Recipes.

Miyoko Schinner’s The Homemade Vegan Pantry likewise features a number of great ideas and recipes for high-end egg-free baking.

vegan egg replacer
The Fat Chimichanga deep fried breakfast burrito featuring scrambled tofu served at Mexico City’s Fat Vegan restaurant.

It’s Easy to Go Egg-Free

Once upon a time, stones were required to make tools and weapons, and eggs were an indispensable part of many baked foods. Those days are happily behind us, and many types of egg alternatives are now cheap, excellent, and easy to find.

For further reading: please check out or Egg-Free Guide and our Guide to Vegan Baking.
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