Monday, August 23, 2010

A word about eggs...

Hi all sorry it's been a few, but, well, summer.

I have been following the egg recalls very closely as we still eat eggs in our house and as we don't own our own chickens.  I can say that I'm very happy how low our exposure is and that we buy local.

We have boiled eggs in egg, and tuna salads or poached for breakfast.  I haven't baked with an egg in ages.  This tends to confuse the non-veggie people, and challenge novice veggies and vegans when they first crack into baking.  I thank goodness my mother is a baker and I came armed with some simple, yet magic, info for vegan baking.

Ground Flax seed, corn starch, and tapioca flour.

These three things are all you will ever need to bake with instead of eggs.  It's a simple basic ratio of one tablespoon alternative = one egg.

How do you know which one to reach for?  It helps if you know why eggs are in a recipe.  Eggs do two jobs in baking, either the yoke adds fat to bind the ingredients or the whites add lift (the fluffy), sometimes its a bit of each.

This too just takes some simple thought about your particular project.  I've listed the alternatives from "heaviest" to "lightest".  If you have a pretty fatty recipe like peanut butter cookies odds are you can skip the egg all together, but otherwise I usually go with flax in a cookie.  Making a cake?  Reach for the tapioca flour.

Play with it a bit but with this simple info you can convert any baked recipe that's been handed down from the ages or found online to a veggie friendly, salmonella free treat.


Also, save money on flax by buying it whole in bulk.  It keeps in the freezer [forever practically] and you can just slap it in the coffee grinder to make your own small batches of flour.  

2 comments:

Loraine said...

Good to know. It's a lot more economical to use these alternatives, and they're also easier to store.

Allysia said...

I've never tried using tapioca starch before! Thanks for the info! :)