Vegan meringues are a lot easier to make than you might think. They are made most often from chickpea water (also known as aquafaba), either from dried chickpeas you have cooked at home, or drained from a can. I predominantly use canned chickpea water for my aquafaba dishes, simply because it’s easier to get hold of. But if you are cooking your own chickpeas, then you can use the leftover water from that.
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Once you get a couple of techniques right, you can have good meringues cooking in the oven in no time. There are a couple of important steps to take to ensure that your meringues hold up. The one that is most often overlooked is simmering your aquafaba to reduce it by one third before you do anything with it. This simple but often ignored step adds strength to your aquafaba and gives it greater stability for things like mousses and meringues. To do this, you simply heat the aquafaba up in a small saucepan and allow it to simmer until it has reduced by one third (you can either estimate it, or be more accurate by measuring the aquafaba before and after cooking to get the exact reduction). Once you have done this, you then need to allow the aquafaba to cool before using it.
For meringue, you need to whip up the chickpea water quite far beyond what you would do to make a mousse. For a mousse you would whip the aquafaba to the firm peak stage and for meringue you need to go all the way to the stiff peak stage, which requires you to whip using an electric whisk for about another 5-6 minutes, while gradually adding sugar. When you have reached the correct stage, your aquafaba will not only be stiff, but it will also have taken on a very glossy consistency.
Making meringues requires a certain degree of patience, both in the preparation and in the cooking. Thankfully most of the time taken is with the meringues sitting in the oven, where you don’t have to do anything, but your oven will be out of bounds for anything else while they are cooking.
It is also very important to make sure that the bowl you are whisking the aquafaba in is completely clean, otherwise impurities from the bowl will hamper your efforts.
If you are struggling with this, or want to see them being made, I have a Meringue Masterclass video lesson available on my membership site, Richard Church’s Vegan Cook School.
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Vegan Meringues
Ingredients
Gluten Free.
- The water drained from 2 cans of chickpeas drain for about 20 minutes and keep the chickpeas for another dish
- 2 tsp cream of tartar
- 150 g caster sugar
Instructions
- As I stated above, the first thing you want to do it to reduce your aquafaba. To do this, pour the drained chickpea water into a small saucepan and bring it to the boil. Reduce the heat to a medium simmer and cook the water for about 6 minutes, or until it has reduced by one third (see notes above for accurate reduction). Now turn off the heat and allow the aquafaba to completely cool. Sitting the pan in a bowl of ice water will make this quicker.
- Pour the cooled aquafaba into a large mixing bowl and add the cream of tartar. Using an electric whisk set to a low-medium setting, begin whisking the aquafaba. Whisk for about 5 minutes, gradually increasing the whisk speed as the aquafaba firms up. The liquid will first start to foam, then it will thicken and become white. After about 5 minutes, you should be at the firm peak stage, where you will be able to tip the bowl upside down without any coming out.
- Once you have reached this stage, begin to add the sugar, a couple of tablespoons at a time, as you whisk to get to the stiff peak stage. It will take another 5-6 minutes to get to this stage, so add the sugar a bit at a time throughout. Make sure that your whisk is on high speed for the last 2 minutes or so of whisking. Once it is done, the aquafaba will have a very stiff and glossy appearance and will hold perfectly on a spoon.
- During the last 5 minutes of whisking, preheat the oven to gas ½ /100C/200F.
- Line 2 baking sheets with greaseproof paper, then spoon or pipe the meringue mix into mounds about the size of a small fist onto the trays. You should get about 16 meringues.
- Place the trays in the oven and cook for about 2 ½ hours, then turn the oven off and leave the meringues to cool in the oven for another hour.
- Remove your meringues from the oven and store in an airtight container until ready to use. They will keep this way for a couple of days.
This recipe is available as a masterclass in my membership site Richard Church’s Vegan Cook School
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