Quick Help - Plant-Based Baking

Replacing the egg in baking is not easy!

The yolk, the white and the whole egg combined allow chefs to do amazing things and no other ingredient has the same range of applications.  There are many products on the market which claim to be a straight egg replacement but we've tried them all and we're not impressed.  There are just too many compromises involved. 

The way MSK approached this problem was not to look for a direct replacement for the egg but to look at individual recipes, break them down and look at what the egg is actually doing in the recipe, then create new recipes which cover all these elements.

Depending on your recipe the egg can be doing any one or more of the following in a bake:

• Whipping:  the main use of egg whites
• Emulsifying: binding the fat and water in our mixtures together.
• Bake-ability: an often under-appreciated role for both the white and the yolk is that in many recipes they provide the essential structure in baked dishes. 

So we've looked to create new recipes using the best available alternatives for each of these techniques:

• Ultrawhip for whipping 
• Silk Gel for emulsification 
• Eggless for bake-ability 

Whipping/ Aeration

The most common replacement for this function of an egg is to use Aquafaba (chickpea water) Aquafaba is an effective whipping agent but it has a couple of negatives. The main one being its flavour and smell, which are mildly unpleasant.  In domestic cooking this is often tolerated as an acceptable trade off, but for fine dining we need to work to a higher standard.

At MSK we use UltraWhip as a whipping agent.  It's completely plant-based, flavourless and odourless, meaning your mix only tastes of what it's supposed to. If you whip up beetroot juice it will only taste of beetroot.  It's perfect for whipping up cake batters, meringues, foams and soufflés.

Bake-ability 

This part can be a little confusing, but when you whisk up a whole egg and pour it into a hot pan, the egg cooks and forms a solid structure. Now think of this within a baked cake. The egg is what cooks and forms a structure, it stops the air pockets collapsing, giving a light, airy texture.

Neither Aquafaba or Ultrawhip on their own offer this ‘bake-ability’, meaning the bake will often collapse as there is nothing there to cook.  It's common to use xanthan gum to try to thicken up the mixture and stop it collapsing but the results are always a little dense and disappointing because it's fundamentally not working the way the egg does. You're not 'clooking' the xanthan gum, you're just thickening the edges of the air pockets. You can feel this thickness in the texture of the cake crumb.

To replace the bake-ability, we use MSK Eggless instead. Eggless provides the 'baked' structure and prevents your bake from collapsing.  It allows you to make baked goods that have a light texture and good structure, without using an egg, and the results are very similar to egg-based bakes.

Emulsification 

An egg yolks is an amazing ingredient in the kitchen, as a thickening agent, as an emulsifier, as a colouring and also to bring flavour. In our recipes we're looking to replace the emulsification properties of the egg yolk. Any recipe that has a fat and a water content needs something to keep them stable and to stop them splitting. Without an emulsifying agent, the oil / fat content will always rise to the top.  Silk Gel is a powerful emulsifier with a silky smooth texture and can be used in any recipe that has both an oil and water content, to stop it splitting.