Vegan Meringues

Since Bip and I made Gingersnap nuts with chilli and came across the ingredient aquafaba, I've been wanting to try and make vegan meringues. At one point I saved some of the kidney bean liquid when I was making Chilli Con Carne and just tried whisking it into stiff peaks. It took ages, as I had quite a lot of it and it was reddish in colour, but eventually I got there, which was very promising. It was also reasonably late in the evening, so I binned it and went to bed.

But when Lundulph asked me to make him some hummus, I dug out the cans with no salt and saved the liquid and also found a recipe to follow and got to work.

I adjusted the recipe amounts to what fit with what I got out of one of the tins.

Ingredients

140 ml liquid from canned chick peas, unsalted
¼ tsp cream of tartar
170 g caster sugar
½ tsp vanilla extract<

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 100 °C and line a couple of sheets with baking paper.
2. Place the liquid in a large glass or metal bowl and whisk. Add the cream of tartar and with an electric whisk, whip until it reaches soft peak stage.
3. Slowly add the caster sugar, while still whisking until reaching the stiff peak stage, finally adding the vanilla extract.
4. Place the meringue in a piping bag and pipe meringues onto the baking paper.
6. Depending on the size, bake for 90 min - 2 h until they come away from the baking parchment easily.
7. Remove from the oven and place on a cooling rack and allow to cool down completely.

I also used this opportunity to try out a technique for creating really colourful meringues by painting stripes on the inside of the piping bag before placing the meringue into it. I didn't have brushes, so I used the flat handles of my desert spoons and my collection of gel food colours. The result was really good and I was surprised that it worked so well.

The meringues took 2 h to bake fully, double that of egg white based meringues. They were also harder than regular ones and tasted a bit different, though this could have been my food colours, I did use a lot in the piping bag. The vegan meringues did hold quite well and tasted better on the second day, while still being a bit harder than what I'd expect from a regular meringue, so would be good for more structural pieces.

I stored the meringues in an airtight box and they didn't get soggy at all for the whole week they lasted.