Really? Yes, I am writing about the liquid 99% of you dump down the drain when you open up a tin of chickpeas. Until a few months ago, I too would be scratching my head about this. This all changed when a dear friend of ours had us over for dinner…

We had an amazing meal which ended with the best chocolate cake I think I have ever had, and they also served up a vegan chocolate mousse which had me stunned when they told me what it was made with. (I think we are also feeling pretty stunned about lucking out with two desserts – they are pretty amazing hosts!!) So, this mousse was made with the liquid from a tin chickpeas, also known as aquafaba. Bean water.

  
There is a website wholly dedicated to the amazing properties of this product. Whilst I don’t expect most of you to be adopting a vegan diet, I do see some great attributes to this product which are worth considering. The biggest thing for me, raw egg! Having been pregnant, for what felt like three years, I am all too familiar with the long list of ingredients I was not able to consume. Had I known I could use this instead… Well, I could have limited some serious culinary suffering. Clearly this is applicable also to young children and the more mature of us who require a bit more care with their diet.

The brilliance of this product, it is pretty much on hand and free as a by-product, if you consume legumes regularly. It can come from either tinned chickpeas, or when cooking dried chickpeas, even other beans can be used. It also pretty much acts like an egg. Although, sadly there seems to be some issue with angel food cake which hasn’t been overcome. But you can make a host of raw ingredients from mousse, marshmallows, fudge, and icing all the way to macarons, cakes, burgers and mayonnaise. It can be raw, whipped, heated and baked. It is much more stable than egg whites which can be helpful for some things.  As it is much more similar to eggs, it means adapted recipes can remain more closely aligned to their original – which is brilliant when you need to cater to several different needs for one meal!

There is a dedicated website to this amazing find, where you can find people have posted how it has worked for them and some great Q&A if want to look into this further. Meanwhile, here is a quick reference of some of the things you might be asking if you want to start using it right away.

As an egg substitute:

3 Tablespoons Aquafaba = 1 Egg

Note – a thicker consisitency works better, similar to egg white, you may need to reduce it in a saucepan a little to achieve this. It is stable enough to be heated.

Keeping your aquafaba

Fresh – keep it in the fridge as you would egg white. No more than a few days.

Freezing – measure it out beforehand and freeze it, just as you would egg white.

For more information, please check out this website:

http://www.aquafaba.com