Every now and then, I find myself browsing the depths of Reddit. Sometimes I stumble upon a subreddit named /r/ididnthaveeggs. The overall gist of this sub-reddit is posting screenshots of comments on recipe blog posts where people subbed increasingly absurd replacements for ingredients they didn’t have in their pantry or fridge.
While most of the commenters are wildly off with some of their assumptions or questions, often leading to horrific results, it got me thinking a bit. As a vegan bakery, we don’t have eggs either (or dairy or any other common ingredients that exploit either people or animals), so we are forced to make “substitutions” in nearly every one of our vegan desserts.
For example, our vegan chocolate chip cookies don’t use eggs, so we worked to find a suitable egg replacer. When replacing eggs in this recipe, we aren’t necessarily looking for something that has the flavor of eggs, but rather mimics the function eggs provide for a recipe. Eggs provide structure and hold ingredients together – and in chocolate chip cookies specifically, they prevent the cookies from becoming crumbly, keeping them soft and moist. Tapioca fiber and potato starch are wonderful at doing just this, and are some of the key ingredients in our egg replacer – but they aren’t a solution for everything.
Some recipes call for egg whites only, like our vegan vanilla cake. In a traditional vanilla cake, including the yolks in the recipe would weigh the cake down as they are very high in fat. You want a vanilla cake (or cupcake) to be light and airy with a moist crumb, so most recipes call for separating the eggs and leaving the yolks aside. When we bake our vegan vanilla cakes, we are no longer trying to provide the moistness and chewiness that our tapioca/potato concoction provides, so we turn to another ingredient. Bean Juice. Yes, you heard that correctly – the liquid from a can of chickpeas (sometimes known as aquafaba) is probably the best replacement for egg whites. We use them in our vanilla cakes, our vegan brownies, and most notably, in our marshmallow frosting. When whipped with caster sugar, it creates a wonderfully fluffy meringue that provides lightness and structure to our most popular vegan desserts.
Another common ingredient used in baking is buttermilk, and whether you are a traditional or vegan baker, it’s likely not something that most people keep lying around. It feels wasteful to buy a jug of buttermilk for one recipe, and then have nothing to do with the leftovers – so we found a better solution. Buttermilk is essentially curdled milk. It’s job is to provide richness and tanginess to recipes, like red velvet cupcakes. Something most people have in their pantry is apple cider vinegar and guess what? It’s both tangy and will curdle your milk. At Aaron’s Vegan Bakery, we use either soy or oat milk in all of our vegan recipes, so simply adding some ACV to plant milk at a 5:1 ratio will give you the exact same structure and flavor of traditional buttermilk, all cruelty-free.
Substituting ingredients in recipes is something even the most experienced bakers do – and when baking as a vegan, it’s just a way of life. But continuing to understand the “why” each ingredient exists in a recipe is critical when choosing the most appropriate replacement. Happy baking! And if things ever get to be too daunting, let us take the guess-work out of things and place an order with us!