Back in 2013, the British blogger Miriam Sorrell came up with a vegan alternative to hard-boiled eggs. Perhaps one of the most complex egg substitutes was also one of the earliest. "You need different ingredients to substitute egg in mayonnaise and in bakery, for example." She has studied the range of vegan eggs that are currently available. "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. 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. But there is one thing that doesn't yet exist – a multi-purpose artificial egg.ĭespite 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. 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. The last few years have also seen an explosion in the availability of egg alternatives. 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. Now those who renounce animal products can still eat lardons, camembert, charcuterie, sausage rolls, mayonnaise, and even sashimi – or at least, plausible substitutes for them. 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.īut today, just seven years on, the vegan scene is almost unrecognisable. I decided to give one a go.Īlas, 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. 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. 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.īut 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.Ĭommercial egg replacements were hard to come by – and if they did exist, they certainly could not be found a few minutes from my flat. In this (almost) pre-Veganuary era, plant-based alternatives were mostly homemade, concocted using tips from a network of ingenious and determined bloggers. 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 front of me were nine perfect golden-brown domes, wafting tantalising suggestions of vanilla and butter (substitute) around the room. As I swept the cakes out of the oven, I could already tell that they were going to be delicious.
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