People wanting to avoid eggs can choose from a number of excellent vegan egg alternatives. Plant-based egg substitutes exist for every sort of recipe. Plus, there are countless vegan recipes for dishes that customarily contain eggs.
The Evolution of Vegan Eggs
Eggs turn up in the vast majority of vegan baked desserts, and also serve as the cornerstone item in countless breakfasts.
Bakers have long relied on eggs as a binding agent. Since the word vegan wasn’t coined until 1944, and the concept didn’t become mainstream until the 1990s, it’s fair to say that, when it comes to cooking, eggs had multi-century head-start over vegan alternatives.
In the early days of veganism, bakers had varying degrees of success (or, more often, failure) replacing eggs with mashed up foods like tofu, baked pumpkin, or bananas. While ingredients like these deliver the moistness that eggs provide, things are often hit-and-miss when it comes to successfully veganizing an eggy recipe. The absence of quality egg substitutes doubtless contributed to giving vegan cooking a bad reputation in the 1970s and 1980s.
Egg Replacers for Baking
The main reason why eggs and egg-whites show up in so many recipes involving flour is that, by virtue of being sticky and liquid, eggs bind together flour and sugars, and add necessary moisture for baking. Eggs can also impart a fluffy texture to baked items. There are several vegan products formulated to replace eggs in baking recipes:
Each of these products is a dry powder. The package indicates amount of powder and water to mix together to replace one egg. The magic substances used by these products to replicate egg’s binding properties are starchy root-derived ingredients like tapioca, arrowroot 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 primary ingredient is chia, it contains a significant amount of beneficial omega 3 fatty acids.
You can also 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.
It’s fair to say that egg replacer powders were indispensable back when few vegan cookbooks existed. But today, countless vegan titles focus on egg-free baking. Given the wealth of terrific vegan baking recipes available today, commercially-made egg replacers are no longer a mandatory pantry item for vegans. You’ll usually get better results by using a vegan recipe than you will by attempting to replace the eggs in an egg-based baking recipe.
Vegan Egg Alternatives
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:
- Crafty Counter: WunderEggs (Hard Boiled Style)
- Hodo: All-Day Egg Scramble
- JUST: JUST Egg and Egg Folded
- Peggs: Plant-Based Eggs
- Simply Eggless: Plant-Based Egg
- Yo Egg: Fried, Poached, and Hard Boiled
TheTakeout.com published this review featuring the JUST, Hodo, and Simply Eggless products.
Vegan Recipes that Mimic Eggs
You cook all sorts of 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. Miyoko Schinner’s The Homemade Vegan Pantry likewise features a number of great ideas and recipes for high-end egg-free baking.
Your basic tofu scramble offers another easy and delicious alternative to scrambled eggs. This dish won’t fool anyone into thinking it’s made from eggs, 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.
Vegan Egg Whites
Since the protein from egg whites is easily whipped up and consequently useful for all sorts of baking needs, countless recipes call for it. Until recently, pastry chefs viewed the properties of egg whites as unique and impossible to duplicate. Luckily, the code has been cracked two different ways: precision fermentation, which I’ll cover now, and aquafaba, which I’ll explain in the next section. Beyond their cooking properties, egg whites are also prized for their high protein content and for being fat-free.
Precision fermentation involves modifying yeast molecules so they will excrete the very same proteins found in eggs. So whatever you can do with a chicken egg white, you can do the very same things with precision-engineered egg whites—be it egg white omelettes or whatever soufflé or other baked treat you have in mind. The results aren’t merely close, they’ll be identical. Healthier Comforts, which has long made a variety of products from chicken eggs, now offers its precision-fermented egg white powder, which it calls Animal-Free Egg White Protein Powder. So if you’re looking for a cruelty-free egg white replacement, you now have an outstanding choice. The stuff may seem costly, but since you blend each tablespoon of powder with three tablespoons of water, an 8 oz package will yield the whites of 23 large eggs.
Aquafaba
Anyone serious about vegan baking should experiment with 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 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.
It’s Easy to Go Egg-Free
Once upon a time, stones were required to make tools and weapons, and eggs were an indispensable component of many baked foods. Those days are happily behind us, and a variety of egg alternatives are now cheap, excellent, and easy to find.
