(literally the amalgamation of the Latin words for water and bean) is the liquid that remains after boiling legumes. In 2014 a French musician this liquid鈥檚 ability to create a foam similar to egg whites, and started a vegan revolution of sorts.
See, for those who do not consume eggs (whether by choice or necessity) certain foods become really difficult to make. Meringues, angel food cake, marshmallows, macarons and some cocktails all rely on eggs for their creation. are common at this point, but they aren鈥檛 all the same, and not all of them work for all things. Aquafaba may be just another egg replacer, but it鈥檚 got some unique properties that other replacers don鈥檛 possess.
The problem is that eggs don鈥檛 serve only one purpose in a food. They are what鈥檚 called a polyfunctional ingredient, since they serve three distinct and culinarily important functions outside of their taste and nutritional roles: emulsifying, coagulating and foaming. Each of these functions is affected by different conditions like temperature and pH, and each relies on different chemical processes.
Eggs as are the simplest to emulate. In this role the egg serves to stabilize a mixture between two immiscible liquids. , or seeds, , (for savoury recipes) or can all be used as egg substitutes in recipes in which the egg functions only as an emulsifier. The main factor affecting emulsifiers is concentration, with dilute ingredients emulsifying poorly. I really enjoy baking but have largely stopped baking with eggs since eggs mostly function as emulsifiers in my recipes, and substituting them for bananas or 鈥溾�� is much cheaper and works just as well!
Eggs as coagulators are more difficult to replace. Eggs coagulate when either heat, strong acids or strong bases cause the proteins in them to denature (lose their structure). The rate and efficiency at which this happens depends on the salt, sugar, and acid content of the food. In eggs the main proteins that coagulate are conalbumin and ovalbumin in the white, and lipoproteins in the yolk. Lots of other proteins coagulate but under different conditions than typically occur during cooking. Egg replacers for coagulation have been attempted. They were made from , , various and wheat products, but they haven鈥檛 really worked. Replacers made with or have been a bit better, while replacers made with have debatably worked the best but using cow鈥檚 blood isolates as an egg replacer probably wouldn鈥檛 sit well with most people who use egg replacers.
The foaming ability of eggs is the hardest to replicate. An ingredient鈥檚 ability to foam is affected by the method of beating, temperature, pH and water content. Some foods such as soy milk or whey protein can create foams, but these foams are not stable at high temperatures, which is what you need to make angel food cake or meringues.
That鈥檚 where comes in! It鈥檚 vegan, temperature resistant, and made from what would otherwise be waste.
Legumes, like chickpeas, are usually bought either canned and precooked, or dry and uncooked. To you simply boil them for about an hour and a half (). During the cooking process the water-soluble proteins and sugars inside the chickpeas are able to . The longer you cook the legumes, the more of this migration will occur, as up to about of the dry weight of each chickpea moves into the water. Once you remove your cooked chickpeas, what you鈥檙e left with is aquafaba, a sort of protein- and sugar-enriched water.
A has found that the main components of aquafaba are polysaccharides, sucrose, and various proteins. Chemically, this mixture has many of the same components as egg whites, so it makes sense that it can function in many of the same ways. The study also found that some of the compounds most important for aquafaba鈥檚 foaming ability are saponins. , as the name suggests, are characterized by the soap-like foam they produce when shaken.
So how do you actually use aquafaba in a recipe? You basically just ! Using a hand or stand mixer, whip the liquid from your can of legumes or your cooking water for about 3-6 minutes to get semi-firm peaks. You can add some cream of tartar to make the peaks firmer for use in or , or skip the whipping and use it as a binder to make or . The application I鈥檓 most excited to try? Aquafaba as a replacement for egg whites in !
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