Imaginative solutions for vegan eggs

Vegan eggs can now be scrambled, fried, boiled, and even poached – but none can yet match the versatility of one produced by a chicken.

As I pulled the cookies out of the oven, I already knew they would be delicious.

Before me were nine perfect golden-brown domes, spreading tempting hints of vanilla and butter (substitute) scents throughout the room.

What could have gone wrong?

It was 2015 and I was a newly converted vegan – at the time, it was often considered “unusual” and possibly even a bit suspicious.

In this (almost) pre-Veganuar era, plant-based alternatives were largely homemade, whipped up with advice from a network of imaginative and dedicated bloggers.

To find these rare delicacies in the grocery store, you would usually have to crawl all the way to the back of health food stores and find refrigerators full of various products that claimed to be related to cheese or chicken.

But of all those struggles, perhaps the biggest challenge was the absence of vegan eggs—partly because few culinary experiences can compare to the satisfaction of biting into a runny yolk, and partly because they're in almost everything.

Commercial egg substitutes were hard to find – and if they did exist, they certainly weren't within a few minutes of my apartment.

Instead, the next best option emerged after a bit of surfing the web, where a number of sites cheerfully recommended alternatives – banana, mashed potatoes, soda, applesauce – which, to be honest, have little in common with real eggs.

I decided to give one of them a chance.

Alas, when I put the first cake in my mouth, with its mixture of perfectly delicious ingredients, which included sugar, self-rising flour, margarine, vanilla extract, banana, soy milk, it was all – somehow – inedible.

The air that held the domes together instantly disappeared, the bronze exterior proved as hard as freshly baked stone, and the entire structure collapsed, like the crater of a volcano that had just erupted.

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But today, just ten years later, the vegan scene is almost unrecognizable.

Today, those who give up animal products can still eat bacon, camembert, cured meats, hot dogs, mayonnaise, and even sashimi – or at least very convincing substitutes for them.

And thanks to a number of serendipitous discoveries, from the creamy goodness of oatmeal to the incredible texture of jackfruit—the latter of which can be transformed into realistic shredded pork or crab—vegan food has managed to shed some of its “rabbit food” stigma and is sneaking into the fridges and ovens of even the most avid carnivores.

The last few years have also seen an explosion in the availability of egg alternatives.

Whether you like your eggs scrambled, boiled, poached or fried, or whether you need them for baking or making cocktails, binding or emulsifying, there are now vegan products to fill almost every available niche.

But there's one thing that doesn't exist yet – a multi-purpose artificial egg.

Despite years of research and the combined efforts of hundreds of professional chefs, scientists, inventors, and home hobbyists, there is no single product that can replace the humble egg.

Instead, you need a whole basket of specialist foods – a mix of complex commercial smoothie solutions and individual ingredients for specific tasks, such as alternatives for baking cakes.

“We have to adjust the vegan egg formula every time, depending on the food we want to make,” says Fatma Bukid, a food technologist at the Institute for Agro-Food Research and Technology in Spain.

She studies the full range of vegan eggs currently available.

"You need different ingredients to replace eggs in mayonnaise and to bake cakes, for example."

Perhaps one of the most complex egg substitutes is also one of the earliest.

Back in 2013, British blogger Miriam Sorrell came up with a vegan alternative to hard-boiled eggs.

The recipe used a combination of soy milk and agar, a gelatinous substance extracted from seaweed, to create egg whites with an authentically chewy texture, and a mixture based on instant puree colored with turmeric to create the characteristically dry, lumpy yolk.

Next up was a pioneering 2019 creation by Australian dietitian Ellie Bullen.

Her version of a vegan egg consisted of a white made from vegan milk, rice flour, and water, which can be spooned into a pan, followed by a soft yolk made from ground pumpkin – after a few minutes, the edges become crispy and bubbly, the yolk remains runny, and aesthetically it is indistinguishable from a regular egg to the eye.

But the latest egg sensation is another Australian invention, created by Adelaide-based cafe Kraks.

In a video posted on the social network TikTok, a knife slides through what looks like a simple fancy breakfast, with toast, bacon and a poached egg slathered with hollandaise sauce and salted with herbs.

As she does so, the egg white cracks and its bright yellow yolk spills onto the plate.

Vegan poached eggs have been described by one blogger as "unicorns" and it's easy to see why - they're especially delicious to make.

Older versions consisted of tofu slices injected with questionable egg yolk alternatives like vegan macaroni and cheese.

But as the article on Weiss explains, Krax's vegan poached eggs with splashing yolks are significantly more sophisticated—made with the help of tomato puree and a technique known as spherification.

This favorite trick of top chefs involves introducing a bubble of liquid – in this case, egg “yolk” – containing sodium alginate, a seaweed ingredient, into a bath of calcium compounds swimming around.

In the second it takes for the yolk bubble to collapse, it forms into a nearly perfect cube, and a membrane forms around it: sodium ions from the outer layer of the sphere replace calcium ions from the bath, forming a jelly-like substance.

This spherical "yolk", with its still liquid interior, can then be removed and the whole process started again – this time to place the yolk inside the globules of "white".

The end result is a Russian babushka of spherified egg substitute.

But there are other clever tricks hiding inside many vegan eggs.

One is Kala namak, or Himalayan black salt.

This mineral is of volcanic origin, and contains iron sulfide compounds mixed with common sodium chloride.

They give fake eggs their pungent egg smell, just like real eggs – the compounds are usually formed when hydrogen sulfide from egg whites reacts with iron-rich proteins in the yolk.

The second surprise is the discovery of the miraculous qualities of chickpea water, known as aquafaba – and it is a bit more versatile.

Indiana software engineer Gus Walt was experimenting with different methods of making vegan pudding back in 2014, when he realized he could create a stable foam by whisking this slightly unusual kitchen cabinet staple.

Aquafaba – which is literally just water drained from a can of chickpeas – eventually became a viral internet hit and is now adored by vegans all over the world.

This ingredient can be used for anything that requires bubbles or a binding agent, which can include cocktails (such as whiskey and lemon), mousses, cakes, cookies, and mayonnaise.

Martin Rini, a professor in the College of Agriculture and Bioresources at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, learned about aquafaba from his daughter.

"I was completely blown away by that information and started experimenting with this product right after that," he says.

To make things even more intriguing, although chickpea water can sometimes serve as an egg substitute, it has a radically different chemical composition than egg whites.

Egg whites are 11 percent protein and very little of anything else.

On the other hand, aquafaba contains a soup of different compounds, including proteins, carbohydrates, isoflavones – chemicals that may help protect against some of the side effects of aging – and, crucially, saponins.

The latter are present in almost all plants and are often used as natural soap.

They foam when rubbed together and can create an emulsion – that is, help oils and water mix – just like egg whites.

Saponins may be the stars, but Rini says every compound in aquafaba plays an important role.

“It requires all the ingredients to work – the saponins to foam, and the proteins and carbohydrates to keep everything in one place (in the form of bubbles),” he says.

But, once again, there are downsides.

For one, aquafaba can't perform every function of a chicken egg – if you tried to fry it, you'd be left with a pan full of liquid chickpea sauce.

“When you make scrambled eggs and you start cooking them, you’re essentially crosslinking the proteins [bringing them together], but there’s not enough protein in aquafaba to crosslink it into a jelly,” says Rini.

Secondly, as with most plant-based ingredients, chickpea water contains a narrower range of building blocks than many animal products.

Chicken eggs contain all nine essential amino acids, plus nine others.

To achieve the same nutritional profile of aquafaba or any other vegan egg substitute, you would have to mix different plant proteins.

One exceptional product that solves the first problem is the Vegan Egg from the vegan food company Follow Your Heart.

They are made with a mixture of soy powder, thickeners, binding agents, and natural flavors.

Unlike many alternatives, it can be used to make pancakes, omelets, or scrambled eggs – as well as for tying things or baking cakes.

However, it still can't be scrambled in the same way that regular eggs can, and as a dried product that is mixed with water, without a separate yolk, it wouldn't work as well poached, boiled, or as an egg on the eye.

In addition to all of the above, Rini suspects that chicken eggs have one major advantage that is rarely talked about: they are all the same.

In the US, most white eggs purchased in supermarkets are produced by Leghorn hens, while in the UK, commercial hens are usually from the four most popular hybrid breeds (Loman Brown, Goldlines, Highlines and Ices).

After more than a century of their intensive interbreeding, they have lost much of the genetic diversity their ancestors possessed.

This means that although chicken eggs are a natural product, they are extremely standardized.

At the same time, there are dozens of vegan egg alternatives on the baking market, so it can be difficult to know how much to add to a recipe.

Even aquafaba is rarely the same – Rini discovered remarkable diversity, both in the type of chickpeas he used (there are hundreds) and the way they are canned.

Some cans of chickpeas he tested for a recent study contained no chickpeas at all – just water.

However, it's not all bad news.

Today's vegan eggs may have fewer uses than those from birds, but the very fact that they are more specialized can become an advantage.

Rini says aquafaba is already better for certain functions than regular eggs, such as emulsifying mayonnaise.

“What impresses me the most at this point, living in South Korea,” says Rini, “is that culinary expertise is based on long-term experience – and if people haven’t used aquafaba for a very long time, if you haven’t traditionally used it as an ingredient, then you just don’t know how to use it yet.”

Similarly, Bukid is confident that egg substitutes will soon have a wider range of applications.

"I think we're working on the first generation of alternative products now, which are trying to mimic conventional ones," she says.

"I think we'll move into the second generation in the future, where we'll innovate to make better products, or products that offer the consumer new experiences with new flavors."

And if that doesn't work, what about a chemically identical egg created in a lab?

American biotechnology company Evri Company announced last year that it was working on proteins grown in a lab using real chicken egg proteins.

The process will involve adding genes that code for a cocktail of these proteins to grow cells, then growing them in vats – the same technique currently used to make synthetic insulin for diabetics.

Unfortunately, even futuristic solutions won't work for everyone.

As with other lab-grown animal products, some vegans will likely find this unethical—not to mention that a yolk-free formula could be as disappointing as a fried egg, boiled egg, or poached egg.

So, the search for the perfect artificial egg continues.

But if after a decade of intensive research, vegans can already eat their own versions of every conceivable variation, who knows what new developments are on the horizon.

Will people one day listen in amazement as they are told that the ingredient they call "egg" once had 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 hold their shape.

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