More Than Just Meringue
More Than Just Meringue
A versatile, egg-white-only cookie recipe, and a vegan version too. Text and photography by Chloe-Rose Crabtree.
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Welcome to Vittles Recipes! In this new weekly slot, our roster of six rotating columnists will share their recipes and wisdom with you. This week’s columnist is Chloe-Rose Crabtree. You can read our archive of cookery writing here.
More Than Just Meringue
A versatile, egg-white-only cookie recipe, and a vegan version too. Text and photography by Chloe-Rose Crabtree.
When I began making crème brûlée cookies at work I was faced with a glut of egg whites, resulting in a familiar dread. I struggled to think of what to do with them other than making meringues. In my home kitchen, egg whites tend to get shuffled around the fridge before being transferred to the freezer and then, many months later, chucked out or cooked for the dog.
The light of inspiration arrived in my inbox courtesy of fellow baker Nicola Lamb, who wrote about a crème caramel made using egg whites in an edition of her newsletter, Kitchen Projects. Nicola writes up the results of her rigorous culinary investigations in granular detail, so I knew I could trust her proclaimed success with this recipe. She got me thinking about where else I could replace whole eggs with egg whites.
For my own experiments, I tapped into the science of baking. The ‘rules’ of baking provide boundaries to come right up to and even push against a little to see what happens. Failed experiments allow me to find out how much room I have to play with.
In baking science, you need to strike a balance between structure builders (usually something with protein like flour or eggs) and structure breakers (usually fats or sugars). Depending on the textures you want to achieve, the ratios of these ingredients will change. To decide on a recipe to try out with egg whites, I first needed to figure out how using just the whites and not whole eggs would change to structure of the resulting dough.
The average large egg weighs around 60g, roughly 18g of which is yolk. The white is made up almost entirely of water and protein, while the yolk also contains substantial quantities of fat. Given that the weight of the yolk is less than a a third of of the weight of the whole egg, I figured that I figured that I could replace a few eggs with their equal weight in egg whites in a recipe that already had a high fat content.
I started cautiously, replacing half the eggs in my snickerdoodle recipe with egg whites, and loved the result so much that I rewrote the recipe. Baking a cheesecake with half the eggs replaced with whites only was nerve-wracking, but that made it all the more rewarding when it turned out really well. Now when I make lighter, fruit-flavoured cheesecakes, I use the egg white-only version.
Emboldened by these successes, I decided to replace all the eggs with egg whites in my base sugar cookie recipe just to see what would happen. A few chocolate samples got coarsely chopped and thrown into the mix too, and I left the dough to age in the fridge before baking. I tried one, thought it was perfectly nice, wrapped the tray, and forgot about it for a few days. When I came back to the cookies, I was surprised and delighted to find that they had been transformed into my chocolate-chip-cookie ideal: the cookie from a Costco multipack. Something about the egg-white substitution and ageing the baked cookies at room temperature created a cookie that was chewy and soft with a subtly crisp exterior (I’m sure someone could explain the science of this, but I am not that guy). This also makes it the perfect cookie for ice cream sandwiches, as they stay soft enough to bite into even after being frozen.
You’ll often find a version of this cookie (and its vegan counterpart – see recipe notes) on the counter at Bake Street with a hodgepodge of mix-ins. In the past I’ve made funfetti cookies, orange and cranberry cookies, white chocolate and macadamia cookies, and cookies that had broken cookies mixed into the dough. This recipe is how I use up ingredients I don’t have use for anymore and how I test flavour combinations – and it’s what I make when I feel like we could all use a really good chocolate chip cookie in our life.
Recipe below – including how to make it vegan.