From bbc.com
Vegan eggs now come scrambled, fried, boiled and even poached – but none can yet match the versatility of those produced by chickens
As I swept the cakes out of the oven, I could already tell that they were going to be delicious. In front of me were nine perfect golden-brown domes, wafting tantalising suggestions of vanilla and butter (substitute) around the room. What could go wrong.
It was 2015 and I was a newly converted vegan – at the time, it was often still considered "weird", and possibly even slightly suspicious. In this (almost) pre-Veganuary era, plant-based alternatives were mostly homemade, concocted using tips from a network of ingenious and determined bloggers. To find these rare delicacies in a shop, you'd usually have to visit the back of a health food store and locate the fridgeful of miscellaneous products claiming to have something to do with cheese or chicken.
But of all these hardships, perhaps the biggest challenge was the lack of vegan eggs – partly because few culinary experiences can compare to the satisfaction of slicing into a runny egg yolk, and partly because they're in almost everything.
Commercial egg replacements were hard to come by – and if they did exist, they certainly could not be found a few minutes from my flat. Instead the next best option emerged after some internet surfing, with a number of websites breezily recommending alternatives – banana, mashed potato, soda, apple sauce – that, let's be honest, have very little in common with real eggs. I decided to give one a go.
Alas, when I put the first cake in my mouth, with its combination of perfectly appetising ingredients, including sugar, self-raising flour, margarine, vanilla extract, banana, and soya milk, it was – somehow – inedible. The air that had been holding the dome up immediately vanished, the bronzed exterior was revealed to be as hard as a freshly baked rock and the whole structure collapsed, like the crater of a newly erupted volcano.
But today, just seven years on, the vegan scene is almost unrecognisable.
Today those who renounce animal products can still eat lardons, camembert, charcuterie, sausage rolls, mayonnaise, and even sashimi – or at least, plausible substitutes for them. And thanks to a number of fortunate discoveries, from the transcendent creaminess of oat products to the uncanny texture of jackfruit – the latter can be transformed into realistic pulled pork or crab – vegan food has shaken off some of its "rabbit food" stigma, and crept into the fridges and ovens of even the most committed carnivores.
The last few years have also seen an explosion in the availability of egg alternatives. Whether you like yours scrambled, boiled, poached or fried, and whether you need them for baking or cocktail-making, binding or emulsifying, there are now vegan products to fill almost every available niche. But there is one thing that doesn't yet exist – a multi-purpose artificial egg.
Despite years of research, and the combined efforts of hundreds of chefs, scientists, inventors and home cooks, there is no single product that can replace the humble egg. Instead, you need a whole basket of specialist foods – a mixture of elaborate commercial concoctions and single ingredients for specific tasks, such as alternatives for baking.
"We need to adapt the vegan egg formulation, depending on the food we want to make," says Fatma Boukid, a food technologist at the Institute of Agrifood Research and Technology, Spain. She has studied the range of vegan eggs that are currently available. "You need different ingredients to substitute egg in mayonnaise and in bakery, for example."
Perhaps one of the most complex egg substitutes was also one of the earliest. Back in 2013, the British blogger Miriam Sorrell came up with a vegan alternative to hard-boiled eggs. The recipe used a combination of soya milk and agar, a gelatinous substance extracted from seaweed, to achieve a white with an authentic rubbery texture, and a mixture based on instant mashed potatoes dyed with turmeric to make a characteristically dry, grainy yolk.
Next came a pioneering creation by the Australian dietician Ellie Bullen in 2019. Her version of a vegan egg involved a white of vegan milk, rice flour and water, which can be spooned into a frying pan, followed by a soft yolk made with mashed pumpkin – after a few minutes, the edges start to crisp and bubble, the yolk remains gooey, and it's aesthetically indistinguishable from ordinary fried eggs.
But the latest eggy sensation was yet another Australian invention, created by the Adelaide-based café Crux. In a video posted to the social media platform TikTok, a knife glides through what looks like an ordinary fancy breakfast, with toast, bacon and a poached egg coated with hollandaise and a scattering of herbs. As it does, the white bursts, spilling its vibrant yellow yolk onto the plate.
Vegan poached eggs were once described by one blogger as "unicorns", and it's easy to see why – they're particularly fiddly to make.
Older versions consisted of slabs of tofu injected with dubious yolk alternatives such as vegan mac-and-cheese. But as a recent article in Vice magazine explains, Crux's vegan poached eggs with pop-able yolks were significantly more sophisticated – made using a tomato-based paste and a technique known as spherification. This favourite trick of high-end chefs involves dropping a blob of liquid – in this case the "yolk" of the egg – containing sodium alginate, which is found in seaweed, into a bath containing calcium compounds.
In the second it takes for the yolk blob to fall, it forms into a near-perfect sphere, and a membrane forms around it: sodium ions from the outer layers of the sphere are displaced by calcium ones from the bath, forming a gel-like substance. This spherical "yolk", complete with a still-runny interior, can then be removed, and the whole process starts again – this time to encase the yolk in a globule of "white". The end result is a Russian doll of spherified substitute egg.
But there are other clever tricks lurking inside many vegan eggs. One is Kala namak, or Himalayan black salt. The mineral is volcanic in origin, and contains iron sulfide compounds mixed in with the usual sodium chloride. These lend fake eggs a pungently eggy aroma, just as they do in real ones – the compounds are usually formed when hydrogen sulfide from the white reacts with iron-rich proteins in the yolk.
Another revelation has been the discovery of the miraculous qualities of chickpea water, also known as aquafaba – and this one is slightly more versatile.
Back in 2014, the Indiana-based software engineer Goose Wohlt was experimenting with different methods for making vegan meringue, when he realised he could create a stable foam by whipping up this slightly unusual cupboard staple. Aquafaba – which is literally the liquid drained from canned chickpeas – eventually became a viral internet hit, and today it's beloved of vegans worldwide. The ingredient can be used for anything that requires bubbles or a binding agent, including cocktails (such as whiskey sours), mousses, cakes, biscuits, and mayonnaise.
Martin Reaney, a professor at the College of Agriculture and Bioresources at the at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, found out about aquafaba from his daughter. "I was totally blown away and started working with the product right after that," he says.
Intriguingly, though chickpea water can sometimes work as a substitute for egg, it has a radically different chemical make-up. Egg white is around 11% protein, and very little else. On the other hand, aquafaba contains a soup of different compounds, including proteins, carbohydrates, isoflavones – chemicals which may help protect against some of the side-effects of ageing – and, crucially, saponins. The latter are ubiquitous in plants, and often used as natural soap. They foam up when they're agitated and can emulsify – that is help oils and water to mix – just like egg whites.
The saponins may be the stars, but Reaney says every compound in aquafaba plays an important role. "It requires almost all the ingredients to work – the saponins for foaming, and the proteins and carbohydrates to hold it all [the bubbles] in place afterwards," he says.
But again, there are drawbacks.
For one, aquafaba can't perform every function of a hen's egg – if you tried to fry it, you'd be left with a panful of liquid chickpea juice. "When you scramble an egg and you cook it up, you're essentially crosslinking the proteins [joining them together], but in aquafaba there isn't enough protein to crosslink that into a gel," says Reaney.
Vegan egg often doesn't contain as much protein as the hen-laid version, but it also isn't as high in cholesterol (Credit: Getty Images)
Secondly, like most plant-based ingredients, chickpea water contains a narrower range of protein building blocks than many animal products do. Hen's eggs contain all nine essential amino acids, plus nine others. To achieve the same nutritional profile from aquafaba or any other vegan egg substitute, you'd have to mix different plant proteins together.
One product that claims to solve the first problem is VeganEgg by the vegan food company Follow Your Heart. It's made with a mixture of soybean powder, gelling agents, binding agents, and natural flavourings. Unlike many alternatives, it can be used to make quiches, omelettes or scrambled egg – as well as for binding things together or in baking. However, it still can't be whipped in the same way that regular eggs can, and as a dried product that's mixed with water, without a separate yolk, it wouldn't work so well poached, fried or boiled.
In addition to all the above, Reaney suspects hen's eggs have one major advantage that's little-discussed: they're all the same. In the US, most supermarket-bought white eggs are produced by Leghorn chickens, and in the UK, commercial chickens tend to be from the four most popular hybrid breeds (Lohman Browns, Goldlines, Hylines and Isa's). After over a century of intensive inbreeding, they have lost much of the genetic diversity their ancestors had. This means that though hen's eggs are a natural product, they are remarkably standardised.
At the same time, there are already tens of vegan egg alternatives on the market for baking alone, so it can be tricky to know how much you need to add to a recipe. Even aquafaba is rarely the same – Reaney has discovered wide variability, both in terms of the type of chickpeas that are used (there are hundreds) and the way they're canned. Some cans of chickpeas he tested for a recent study didn't contain any – only water.
However, it isn't all bad news.
Today's vegan eggs may be less versatile than those that come from birds, but the very fact they're more specialised could become an advantage. Reaney says aquafaba is already better at certain functions than regular eggs, such as emulsifying mayonnaise.
Most vegan egg substitutes currently have a limited range of functions – but some experts think they will eventually be better than the real thing (Credit: Getty Images)
"What I'm quite struck by now, living in [South] Korea," says Reaney, "is that culinary expertise is based on long-term experience – and if people haven't been using aquafaba for that long, if you haven't traditionally used an ingredient, then you just don't know how to use it yet."
Similarly, Boukid is confident egg replacements will soon have a wider variety of uses. "I think now we are working on the first generation of alternative products, which are trying to mimic the conventional products," she says. "I think in the future we'll go to the second generation where we will innovate to make better products, or like products offering the consumer new experiences like new flavours."
Failing that, how about a chemically identical lab-made egg?
The American biotechnology company The Every Company announced last year that it was working on making lab-cultured egg whites using real chicken egg proteins. The process would involve adding the genes that code for a cocktail of these proteins to yeast cells, then growing them up in vats – the same technique currently used to make synthetic insulin for diabetics.
Unfortunately, even this futuristic solution wouldn't work for everyone. As with other lab-grown animal products, it seems likely that some vegans would consider it unethical – not to mention that the yolk-less formulation might be disappointing fried, boiled, or poached.
So, the search for an ideal artificial egg continues. But if after just over half a decade of intensive research, vegans can already eat their own versions of every conceivable kind, who knows what new developments are on the horizon. Might people one day listen in wonder, as they're told that the ingredient they call "egg" used to have something to do with chickens?
At the very least, I'm optimistic that the next time I make vegan cakes they'll be transcendently light and fluffy – and most importantly, they'll keep their shape.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220120-the-race-to-make-a-multipurpose-vegan-egg
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