How to Make It and What To Do With It
When you boil beans in water, the liquid left when the
beans are removed is aquafaba.
What is Aquafaba?
When experimenting in the kitchen – whether out of
necessity or curiosity – it’s always fascinating to
discover new replacement ingredients. Applesauce and
mashed bananas can be a low-fat stand-in for butter
when baking your favorite muffins. Greek yogurt can
take the place of sour cream (or vice-versa), and honey
is a golden substitute for white sugar. But perhaps the
most unexpected replacement ingredient is aquafaba.
It’s simply the liquid left behind after cooking
garbanzo beans (aka chickpeas). It whips up into the
fluffiest, most perfect meringue you’ve ever seen this
side of an egg white.
That’s right – the thick, slightly murky water you
cooked your garbanzo beans in last time you made hummus
(or the last time you cooked any beans from scratch) is
actually a highly successful egg replacement –
particularly for egg whites – allowing you to make
perfectly light and fluffy macarons, lemon meringue
pie, mousse, homemade ice cream, marshmallow cream,
frostings and even frothy cocktails, all without egg
whites. You can also use aquafaba to make egg-free
mayonnaise, flavored aiolis, meatloaf and so much more.
Aquafaba isn’t just for vegans – it’s deliciously
economical for everyone.
Even if you’re not interested in giving up eggs, it’s
fun to save money with aquafaba! Keep your egg stash
for omelets and use the bean-water that you’d normally
toss down the drain to create your favorite baked
goods, desserts and more. A combination of the Latin
word for water (“aqua”) and bean (“faba”), aquafaba
went viral in 2015 thanks to the tinkering of Goose
Wohlt, a systems engineer from Indiana. While trying to
create a vegan meringue, Wohlt ditched the stringy
vegan egg replacement he’d bought at the store and
tried whipping up bean liquid instead. A wizard-like
moment quickly unfolded in perfectly stiff peaks:
“Moments later, out of this goopy product, a pillowy,
dense foam arose, exactly like you might expect from
egg whites,” writes Wohlt in the introduction to
Aquafaba: Sweet and Savory Vegan Recipes Made Egg-Free
with the Magic of Bean Water.
Is that an egg-white meringue? No, it’s whipped
aquafaba, made with Camellia Brand Garbanzos (aka
Chickpeas)!
It’s goopy. It’s thick. It makes the perfect meringue.
The meringues made with aquafaba were practically
identical to those made with egg whites – and head and
shoulders above those made with commercially available
vegan egg replacements. Wohlt shared his story on
Facebook with a vegan baking group, and the rest is
legume-water history. Home kitchen trial-and-error with
aquafaba took off across social media for vegans, those
with egg or dairy allergies and anyone curious about
the culinary properties that makes something so
improbable, work so well.
Five years later, there’s still not a great
understanding of why aquafaba is so effective as an
egg-white substitute. A study launched in 2018 by the
National Institute for Health notes that, “The solution
has recently been shown to produce stable foams and
emulsions, and can act as a thickener [but] as aquafaba
is both new and being developed by an Internet-based
community little is known of its composition or
properties.”
Aquafaba lovers share their tips and tricks.
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