I mentioned Aquafaba once in a post about beans.  I don’t know how someone stumbled across this, but it’s a pretty amazing thing — especially for those who are allergic to eggs.  See, eggs have some fairly unique properties.  They play numerous roles in most of the recipes they’re found in, and they’re pretty difficult to substitute without losing at least one of the qualities they provide in any given recipe.  Until aquafaba.

Aquafaba is, literally translated, “bean water.”  It’s the liquid left over when you drain a can of beans (usually garbanzos/chickpeas), or after you cook beans yourself at home.  And amazingly, it has many of the same properties as eggs when used in recipes.  This Book — Aquafabulous — shows you how to use aquafaba in the context of a vegan kitchen.

The book starts with an introduction to aquafaba.  This is only a few pages, and covers what it is, how much to use, etc.  This is followed by a few pages of “the vegan pantry.”  This doesn’t list every possible vegan food, but it does hit some highlights of both “core” ingredients, and some less-common ones or those significant for adding flavor.  These sections are followed by the recipes, which comprise the bulk of the book.

Recipes are in seven categories: basics, breakfast, snacks & appetizers, salads & sides, mains, baked goods, and desserts.  “Basics” are what I like to refer to as “building blocks.”  Essentially, they’re recipes for ingredients.  The first recipe in this section is for homemade aquafaba, and it offers three methods: stovetop, slow cooker, and pressure cooker.

Most of the remaining recipes in this section aren’t really aquafaba-related; they’re recipes for things like plant-based milks (or “mylks”) that round out the vegan kitchen.  (Although chickpea milk is a handy counterpart to aquafaba, giving you something to do with the actual beans left over after straining off the “bean water”!)  There are several other aquafaba-containing recipes in this section, though.  Aquafaba Cheese, Herbed Nut Cheese (with aquafaba and almonds), Roasted Garlic Mayo, Coconut Bacon (I’m not sure why this has aquafaba in it, since most coconut bacon recipes I’ve seen don’t — and are already vegan), Aquafaba Meringue, and Marshmallow Fluff.

The breakfast section contains all the old standbys, including those which are typically “eggy,” like French toast, crepes, and breakfast burritos.  Pancakes, waffles, etc. also make their appearance.

Snacks and appetizers include roasted chickpeas, energy bites, and several varieties of hummus and other vegetable dips.  There are a variety of salads, but nothing that especially stands out.  However, Grown-Up Tater Tots are a pretty intriguing recipe.  They’re a vegan take on cheese-stuffed tots.  Mains include everything from soups to Chickpea “Chicken” Salad, curry, pulled jackfruit, cashew chickpea alfredo, and meatless loaf with miso gravy.

Baked goods also cover a variety, including pizza dough, pie crust, zucchini & banana breads, muffins, crackers, and cookies.  Desserts is a surprisingly long section — the longest in the book, I think.  It includes five pies, meringues, pavlova, five cakes, several doughnuts, marshmallows…and over a dozen more.

The variety of recipes in this book is, indeed, fabulous.  I love how outside-the-box it gets with things like “scrambled eggs” and “chicken salad.”  I’m not typically one for “substitutes,” but these use wholesome ingredients which, if good in these applications, can be good options in their own right and add some variety to the diet.  (I don’t, for instance, buy into the whole “mashed cauliflower is a good substitute for mashed potatoes” thing.  Mashed cauliflower is nothing like mashed potatoes.  But it is good.  As mashed cauliflower.)

I’m not going to lie, though, I was disappointed that there was so little about aquafaba in the book.  Most of Robert Rose’s cookbooks have a significant section at the front that’s full of information — about a particular diet, a particular ingredient, etc.  So given an entire cookbook about such an unusual ingredient as aquafaba, I expected more than just three-and-a-half pages about it in the front of the book.

So, TL;DR* — it’s a good book, but it isn’t quite what I expected.

*too long; didn’t read — another way of saying “here’s the short version”

Aquafabulous {review} is a post from: Titus 2 Homemaker

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