Baking with aquafaba

With my internship rapidly coming to a close and only a couple days left in the kitchen, Nicole, Ben, and I decided that it was time to set aside my goal of making allergen-free bread, and focus instead on testing already-allergen-free recipes and other food alternatives.

I decided to spend the day testing recipes using a “food” that’s all the rage these days – aquafaba. Aquafaba is the liquid in cans of beans, or the water resulting from cooking dried beans. During the bean cooking process, starches, proteins, and other solids leach out of the legumes and into the surrounding water, giving the water foaming, emulsifying, binding, and thickening properties. Aquafaba is nearly calorie-free, with only about 3 calories per tablespoon.

Numerous aquafaba recipes have popped up on the internet, and the first one that I tried was… muffins (I’ve always had a little rebellious streak).

Have I mentioned that I love muffins? I regularly make allergen-free banana muffins for myself, but they’re gummy affairs that would make a normal human choke.

The rumor is that whipped aquafaba can be used as an egg replacement, I was making buckets of it, and I was hungry, so I figured, why not try it? I whipped up half a cup of liquid from a can of garbanzo beans with 1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar, then folded about 6 tablespoons of the foam into my gummy allergen-free muffin recipe. And the results were…amazing. The recipe is still a bit too moist for general consumption, but the difference was dramatic.

Really. I ate three of them.

Bolstered by that success, I moved on to my real tasks of the day – making aquafaba mayo and meringues.