So it’s been a while since my last post. In that time I’ve turned 41 and decided to finally go vegan. Not saying it will be easy and at the moment I’m having an inner battle trying to convince myself that I won’t really miss cheese, but I’m going to give it a good go.
One of the things that I really like about cooking is the science of it all. I would never pretend to be an expert but it always fascinates me how you combine a few ingredients together and then a little bit of magic happens in the oven/ frying pan/ slow cooker. Anyway, recently something came to my attention which was seriously mind-blowing! I’m talking about the revolutionary new vegan ingredient of aquafaba.
Aquafaba, in case anyone isn’t familiar with it, comes from the latin for bean water. In my case it was the liquid from a tin of chickpeas which I used last night to make a lovely Channa Masala! This also ties in nicely with my love of recycling wherever possible as it meant that nothing from that tin was wasted. Aquafaba is used as an egg replacement but, even though I saw plenty of evidence online, I wanted to see if it worked for myself.
The recipe I chose for my experiment can be found here and it involved whisking the bean water with lemon juice (I don’t have any cream of tartar so this was a substitute!) and icing sugar until it transforms into meringue-like peaks. Watching the liquid transform was pretty amazing and I would have said it was like magic, apart from the fact that it was a very slow process. Even with an electric whisk it took me almost an hour to get the desired consistency- thank goodness I wasn’t doing it by hand!
Once whipped, I had to bake the nests in the oven for 2 hours on a very low setting- Gas Mark 0.25! Unfortunately my oven only goes as low as 0.5 but, as I’m never convinced it’s as hot as it should be anyway, I thought I would be ok. The recipe made 12 nests so I had to use 2 baking trays to fit them all in however, the recipe stresses that you shouldn’t open the oven at all so I was a bit concerned about not being able to swap them round but I told myself it was an experiment so time would tell!
When the moment of truth finally arrived, I opened the oven to find a tale of 2 meringues! The top shelf nests were slightly brown, very crispy and tasted a little bitter whilst the bottom shelf nests were pale, chewy and stuck to the baking paper! We did try to eat them but it didn’t go too well. Not to be daunted though, I will try again but next time I will be better prepared thanks to a very helpful vegan meringue Facebook group that I am now a member of! Sadly I don’t have photographic evidence of the finished products but you can rest assured that, when I finally get this recipe to work, I will be proudly posting pictures all over the place!!
40fying 