Eggs, who needs 'em?

Before jumping in and sharing recipes, I thought it might help to give a bit a background information about eggs (rather, the lack of) in gluten-free vegan baking. In learning to bake as a vegan, eggs are probably the most daunting ingredient to try to simulate because they are a key structural component of baked goods. With a few exceptions (sponge cake comes to mind), there is a way to modify any recipe so as not to include eggs. The tricky part is knowing how to go about it. In baked goods, eggs bind, leaven and give fluffiness to cakes and pastries. In gluten-free baking, it is especially common to find eggs on the ingredients list because of the inherent lack of binding in gluten-free flours. Wheat flour alone has some binding power due to the gluten, this is why you can mix flour and water and end up with an elastic dough that can be rolled or stretched. Pizza, pita, or bread doughs with gluten will hold together this way just based on the gluten in the wheat flour. If you try mixing a gluten-free flour with water, however, you will not get this same type of elasticity, so eggs are frequently used in gluten-free recipes to hold the dough together. Gluten-free breads and mixes usually call for eggs. Not so great if you are trying to be vegan and you have to avoid gluten.

To recap, gluten-free vegan baking has a structural double-whammy in holding ingredients together: no eggs and no gluten. It is standard to add a teaspoon or 2 of xantham gum when baking with gluten-free flours to make them hold together more like all-purpose wheat flour would, but this does not solve the egg issue. To a large extent, the egg replacement you choose depends on the type of recipe you’re making. My standard approach is to use a mixture of flax-seed meal dissolved in warm soymilk. To do this, simply heat about a 1/4 c of soymilk in the microwave for 30-45 s, submerge in it 2 tbsp of flax seed meal, let sit for several minutes, and then whisk with a fork. This creates a gelatinous mixture that works well in cookies, cakes, muffins, and breads. The flax-seed meal mixture is only one of several ways to replace eggs in a vegan recipe. In addition to the flax-seed meal mixture, you can experiment with using commercials egg replacers (such as Ener-G), a few tablespoons of applesauce, or mashed banana. If you like to experiment and have time, it is interesting to try the same recipe changing only the type egg replacer. Here are my own observations:

· Flax-seed meal dissolved in soymilk seems the most multi-purpose.
· Applesauce tends to make things cakey which is great for muffins and cakes, but not preferable for cookies.
· Commercial egg replacers like Ener-G are essentially starch (potato starch, usually) and work well for breads, but can make the texture dense and rubbery if too much is used.
· Banana does seem to do the trick of binding and is less cakey than applesauce, but also more noticeable in flavor.
· Apple cider or white vinegar can be mixed with baking soda to “fizz” and leaven cakes, breads and muffins. I haven’t experimented as much with this one.

If you are new to vegan or gluten-free baking, you will surely develop your own tastes, preferences, and techniques as you go along, but hopefully, this gives you good jumping-off point. Now for some recipes!