Aquafaba Meringue Hack

Recently I have been creating several cold preparation recipes involving whipped aquafaba.

By cold preparation recipes I mean mousses, swiss buttercreams, meringues and the like.

In order to create a stable mousse that will hold up to slicing and not lose it’s integrity before you even get to the event, my first trick was to add agar to the reduced bean water so that when whipping it would automatically stabilize the meringue making it that mush stronger for whatever recipe I was folding it into.

This worked like a dream and so I started doing that with the creation of my most recent Pumpkin Mousse Cake, Raspberry Mousse Cake and even my Aquafaba Swiss Meringue Buttercream.

The new found stability of the meringue base really proved helpful in the final strength of the cake; but what I found was that to whip such a small amount of aquafaba (with or with out the agar) was always a bit tricky.

Especially for people using hand mixers, I’ve been told it was a bit of a problem.

So in addition to my secret stabilization weapon (agar) I developed what I am calling my Aquafaba Meringue Hack.

By whipping aquafaba in bulk you get a much stronger more stable meringue and then you will only use the amount of whipped that you need to fold into your recipe.

What to do with all that leftover meringue you might ask?

Refrigerate it! It will deflate over time and go almost back to liquid, but by simply re-whipping it again later (3 and 4 times even!) it will whip back up to perfectly beautiful, stiff, glossy meringue just like it was the first time.

Take that you dumb eggs!

Below is a chart to help you figure out just how much whipped meringue you would use when the recipe calls for it in liquid form first.

And here below is my video of the step by step process all the way through to the time lapse deflating of the aquafaba excess and then the re-whipping of the same.

Take it one step farther and add some sugar and vanilla extract to some of the beautiful, glorious aquafaba meringue and you have yourself some vegan whipped cream to serve on whatever you like!

I also mentioned that I have been doing this for my Swiss Aquafaba Meringue Buttercream for added stabilization to the recipe, again it works like a charm!

If you want to get some practice with this method here are Four Aqauafaba Mousse Desserts you will not want to live without!

 

**Note:

As usual I have the BEST viewers and visitors here to my blog and I was waiting for someone to ask this question re: My Chart above for the conversion from liquid to whipped AF.

Here is what she wrote and my then response:

Hi, Gretchen. I’m trying to understand the ratio here and if I do the math, I come up with 1 1/4 cup(instead of 3/4 cup) if I start with 1/4 cup liquid. I’m I wrong ?

Hi Diane, yes I was waiting for someone to call me on that. This is a very loose math conversion. Since I started with 1¼ cups liquid and got a very estimated volume of 6 cups. (Since volume measure is never exact really anyway)
so the next breakdown would be Half of 1¼ liquid = ½ cup + 2 Tbs. But since there are rarely any recipes calling for ½ cup + 2Tbs – I rounded down to ½ cup liquid would probably whip up closer to 2 cups volume in meringue.
The next breakdown conversion would be ¼ c + 1 Tbs – again I rounded down to just a ¼ cup which when whipped would yield about 1 cup

I had been doing it that way in my recent Pumpkin Mousse & Raspberry Mousse cakes and those amounts whipped (from my first attempts at whipping the tiny ¼ cup liquid amounts) seems to yield very close amounts to those I listed on the chart.
Hope that makes sense? And i know… it’s NOT EXACT which is strange for me and baking altogether, but it works!

*especially since what I noticed when I whipped just the 1/4 cup called for in the recipe, my volume whipping that small amount was actually slightly LESS (and less strong) than when I whipped in bulk, so I felt better about rounding DOWN since I didn’t want the recipes to be getting MORE whipped AF than any original author would have intended.