Egg free formulations

Challenges during vegan based formulations

• Offnotes
• Too wet
• Air stabilisation
• Disintegration

With selecting the right combination of ingredients, often offnotes coming from certain plantbased proteins can be masked and nowadays more and more flavour houses have masking agents available. Where it was first dominantly for high protein products (such as bars and sports recovery drinks) with the evolvement of plant based meat alternatives also for baking are becoming available.

Another challenge is in getting the cake right: if the air incorporation can’t be reached, the leavening agents might be able to compensate, but in the way the proteins form a structure and denature a tendency to produce a wet, slightly oily cake can be the result. Ingredients that have a tendency to ‘dry’ a product, which can be a hydrocolloid or wheat gluten can aid in this case to overcome

In several cake formulations saturated fats have been replaced, resulting in the usage of oils, which create a challenge of stabilisation of structure upon cooling when egg is being replaced. Similar is for foam cakes, where traditionally no or low amounts of oils are being used: densities are low, which seems a challenge to reach and simultaneously most emulsifiers can’t be very effective as they also require some fat or oil in the formulation to bind with. Overcoming with hydrocolloids could result in wetter product resulting in a new (or previous) challenge to be solved.

As egg has the tendency to bind and gel all materials together, it shows that when working on foam cakes, the cake tends to become crumbly and fall apart. Where foam cakes are normally used to make swiss rolls or celebration cakes, by being too weak to decorate, fold/ roll it might not be possible. To overcome this proteins, modified starches and/ or hydrocolloids can be used.

As Bakery Academy we have been working on this topic for a few years now and have created both long shelf life Vegan (as well as eggfree) cupcakes and have created a few vegan foam cakes. We have a partner, Cakeparts.nl, that sells those products as a premix if you are interested.

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