Sunday, March 23, 2008

Substituting eggs...in muffins.




In an earlier post, I noted the difficulties in baking without eggs. I'm following up with a little more research, this time using a gluten-free apple muffin recipe from my go-to baking book, Gluten-Free Kitchen by Robyn Ryberg. To make this completely friendly to the FAQ, this was gluten free and dairy-free.

The experiment was to use the recipe with eggs (left), and with Ener-G egg replacer (right with pearl sugar). Ener-G is made with potato and tapioca starches with a leavener, and is really for baking purposes, not other egg usage.

The result? The Ener-G muffins rose higher, and therefore looked little nicer and more muffin-like. However, they were drier, and didn't have as nice a chewy texture as the with egg version. I guess the proteins in the egg really do show up in baked goods.

I would venture to guess that these would be best in cookies and things that didn't rely heavily on the eggs for texture, like cakes, but will continue to test.

Anyone out there find any better products for baking without eggs? Please share!

4 comments:

ZM said...

It's a tough one. Eggs give moisture, some fats/flavor of richness and infrastructure. Ener-G offers a little lift and moisture, but still.

Bottom line? there's no real substitute for an egg. You can use a banana for very moist baked goods (tonight, i used bananas instead of eggs for vegan french toast), you can use Ener-G, but my favorite is the flax-gels.

1 Tb ground flaxseeds (flaxmeal)
2 Tb warm water (hot unless working with yeast).

That gels nicely, and replaces one egg. But not, alas, for deep frying. So much for croquettes...

Anonymous said...

Ya...it's a toughie. I haven't found any commercial product that the egg replacer does well with (and I've tried). My experience has been that the best results with the egg replacer come when you make baked goods from scratch only. They seem to have less of a negative impact when baking from scratch vs. any box mix.

Anonymous said...

Hi,
I have a child with severe food allergies to dairy and egg. Whenever I bake I add a cup of organic (not chunky) applesauce along with the recommended engerG egg replacer. The applesauce seems to put the density back into muffins and cupcakes. I hope this help!

Tara Humphries said...

In my muffins I use 15 ml white vinegar to substitute for each egg, you can not taste the vinegar and they are light and fluffy and moist. Here is a link to one of my muffin recipes:
http://www.everydaywithallergies.com/2008/06/apple-and-peach-muffins.html
I have tried my muffin recipes with gluten free flour and they worked fine.