Baking has traditionally made extensive use of egg whites, especially the way they can be beaten into a foam and then set with heat. While I eat eggs, I have a lot of people in my life who avoid them for ethical reasons, and this often limits what I can bake for them. I was very excited to learn, though, that you can now buy extremely realistic vegan egg whites!
EVERY engineered yeast to convert sugar into ovalbumin, the main protein in egg whites and the one responsible for most of its culinary function. This kind of fermentation was pioneered for insulin and microbial rennet in the 1980s, but many companies are now applying it to producing all kinds of vitamins, proteins, dyes, and enzymes.
EVERY has been working with commercial customers for several years, but you can now buy it as a shelf stable powder. At $24 for the equivalent of 45 egg whites ($0.53 each) it's more expensive than buying conventional ($0.21 each) or organic ($0.33) egg whites, but not massively so.
I learned about them from a coworker who made an angel food cake, and I've since made flourless chocolate cake and swiss buttercream frosting. It whipped and set just like egg whites; it's really impressive!
While this is great from a vegan perspective, it won't help most people who are avoiding eggs for allergy reasons: it's still ovalbumin. Labeling will generally say something like "contains: egg allergen", and the packaging I bought has the quite wordy "although not from eggs, the proteins may cause allergic reactions in certain individuals, especially those sensitive to egg, due to its similarity to real egg."
I'm now trying to figure out all the things that this now means I can cook for my oldest (no eggs for moral reasons). And also what sort of places that the ability to make "less watery egg whites", by mixing the powder with less water than normal, could let me do things I couldn't otherwise.
Thanks Jeff!! I've been waiting for this exact news for 23 years.
As a college undergrad I ate an obscene amount of egg whites and whey protein. I also regularly genetically engineered yeast (and E.coli) to create small batches of protein for x-ray crystallography. I thought it would be a fairly simple engineering problem to create these proteins at scale in a way that would be more resource efficient and require less animal suffering.
I considered trying to go the entrepreneurial route and develop this myself; given how long its taken to make this happen and how slowly the cost has come down (Perfect Day has been doing for years for whey what Every now does for ovalbumin), it seems like the engineering side is much more difficult than I could have imagined. I'm still optimistic that these process will improve to the point that they can provide these proteins at a much cheaper price point than the animal sourced versions. If anyone has any info on the constraints here, or wants to start a prediction market on when the products will reach cost parity, I'd love to see it!
2026, the year vegan baking was solved!
On a more serious note:
I would be interested in an econ person's take on how they predict the price to change over time. Intuitively, I feel that $0.53 is a promising number for a newly launched product, and if demand increases, the price would plummet and make it the de-facto choice for many products that contain egg whites?
Wow great PSA. Claude tells me this could be the solution to vegan matza balls that don't fall apart, as well as all the other desserts. Just ordered some to Australia.
How are you getting it to Oz? I'm not finding anywhere that ships to NZ 🥲
Amazon US store.
Really cool! I hope it becomes available in the UK soon.
Meanwhile in Israel, Solve is a company offering a whole egg substitute for baking, for 130 ILS for ~50 small eggs (currently ~42 USD, although the war makes the conversion somewhat unrepresentative). I've not used it but I've heard good things from a gourmet chef. They also sell a "meringue powder", called Mery Mix by an Italian company, Lapet, at 65 ILS per 1kg(!). Not sure how this converts to eggs.