The case against "aquafaba" (Or, in defense of bean broth).

I realize the title of this post may ruffle some feathers, so let’s get one thing straight: I have nothing against this ingredient - on the contrary, I’ve been using it regularly for a few years now. (If you’re still wondering what this so-called “aquafaba” is, don’t worry, I’m about to fill you in.) And if you know and love this stuff, hear me out - I love it too, but there are a few issues I just can’t overlook...about its name. It’s been quietly bothering me since I first encountered it, and now that some commercial products are starting to use the ingredient, I just have to speak up. 

First off, just to make sure we’re all on the same page here: I’m talking about a certain egg substitution trick that’s been making waves in the last three or so years. It works fantastically in many situations, in fact, often much better and more versatile than other popular subs like flax gel, fruit puree, tofu, or packaged egg replacer. Most importantly, unlike these other egg subs, it creates a stable foam. And chances are, you already have it in your pantry! If you’re already in the loop, you know where this is headed. But if not, get ready...this is going to sound pretty weird. Are you ready? OK, here we go: It’s the liquid from boiled or canned beans. Yep, that soupy stuff you usually pour down the drain. I’m serious! The chemical/molecular reasons why it works are very different from what goes on in an actual egg (I’ll get to this later), but the end results have a surprising number of similarities. When I first read about this back in 2015 I was immediately excited - what a neat way of exploring the properties of food! 

Now, here’s where the controversy comes in: This discovery is attributed to certain individuals in the vegan baking community, and these same people dubbed the ingredient “aquafaba,” cobbled-together Latin for “bean water.” Again, I’m very fond of the ingredient, and find it extremely useful - in fact, in some GF formulas, I find the results to be superior to using actual eggs (I’ll get to that later too). But first, let’s address the terminology. I’m not a fan of that name. Commonly, the immediate response to hearing it is “aqua-what??” Newcomers to free-from diets are already overwhelmed by the long list of unfamiliar inventory. There’s no need to add to that by making up new words for things that we’re already well acquainted with. Just call it what it is: bean broth. That may still take a tiny bit of explaining, but it’s a descriptive and matter-of-fact term that avoids making it sound weird or “alternative.” 

But wait, shouldn’t the people who discovered it have the right to name it what they want?, you may be asking. Which brings me to my next point: I’m not on board with the origin story either. As a matter of fact, we already know that bean broth actually has been deliberately used as an ingredient for centuries. In medieval Europe, where animal foods were intermittently restricted by the Catholic calendar, water from boiling legumes was commonly used to enrich soups in place of meat broth on non-meat days. So we know for a fact people noticed its consistency was useful. That’s an example that’s actually documented - many more everyday uses of humble ingredients likely went unrecorded! This knowledge wasn’t lost in the middle ages, by the way: for instance, the 1982 cookbook Bean Cuisine (where it is referred to as bean stock) suggests using it to add body and flavor to casseroles and soups. 

The people who are given credit for “discovering aquafaba” might have been the first ones to notice that the liquid from canned beans is just the right concentration that it can be subbed for eggs by weight - and that is indeed a highly significant discovery, don’t get me wrong. But considering beans have been boiled in kitchens everywhere for hundreds and hundreds of years, I would honestly be surprised if no one ever considered its potential until 2014. I mean, have you ever watched a pot of beans cooking, when the foam starts to rise and maybe even boils over? That stuff fluffs up like a bubble bath! I can't really fathom that in all the time humans have been cooking legumes, there hasn't been at least one person who's noticed that foam and thought, ‘hey, maybe I could use that property,’ just as people noticed it could be used to thicken. Additionally, on an academic level, the foam-stabilizing properties of legume arabinogalactans have been noted in research papers (specifically, papers focusing on the microstructure of idli and other fermented foods) going back to the 1970s - so we also know the foaming properties were indeed previously recognized as useful in baking applications long before this decade.

So, there’s my rant. Check back soon for part 2, where I’ll show you the science of how and why to use this ingredient for gluten-free baking!

Bean broth whipped for icing.

Substitution spotlight: Traditional non-dairy milks in European baking and cooking

A traditional-style homemade seed milk.

Ah, good old-fashioned plant milks. No, that's not an oxymoron! It's often assumed that the idea of a milk substitute is a modern concept; sure, other things may fill the same culinary niche in cultures without a major tradition of dairy production, but it's not like people in previous centuries needed something to use for vegan cupcakes...right? Historically, if you couldn't have milk for whatever reason, you'd just leave it out...right?? Not necessarily! Milk is highly perishable, and it's easy to forget that until relatively recently, it was also a seasonal food. Add this to the many days with dietary restrictions imposed by the Catholic church interspersed throughout the calendar, and the existence of non-dairy milk becomes quite logical. Their use was by no means restricted to times when dairy was unavailable. From this we can see that people found them useful and enjoyable, and even practical. In some cases, they were indeed used as a milk substitute in the modern definition (though not necessarily for the same reasons) and treated as interchangeable with dairy; in other dishes, they were simply part of the recipe.

Almond milk, in particular, has a long and rich history, having originated during the middle ages in the Arabic-speaking world and becoming popular as a dairy substitute in Europe a couple of centuries later. The first English-language mention of almond milk I’m aware of was in 1390, though because it's called for as an ingredient in a larger recipe, I'm guessing it was already well-established by that time. Other nut and seed milks can also be traced back to this era; where almonds were prohibitively expensive or unavailable, milks made from regional ingredients like poppyseeds, hazelnuts, and hempseeds are also well-documented!

Milk was not even the only way people found to use nuts and seeds like dairy - recipes also detail the preparation of almonds in ways which resembled cream, butter, and even a sort of acid-curdled cheese! This is where I should point out: all these preparations bear little resemblance to modern processed, emulsified, stabilized milk substitutes, and the cheese certainly would not melt like some of the new products do (it is more like a crumbly or spreadable fresh cheese). Rest assured, though - from a food science perspective, these traditional nut and seed milks are actually much cooler! Thanks to the unique properties of their proteins, fats, etc., you can do things with them that simply can’t be done with the commercial stuff (the packaged kind is very watered-down, and on top of that, the stabilizers and other additives get in the way). (By the way, this applies to soy milk, too, which is about as old as almond milk and just as traditional, but I have not included it in this discussion as it was not considered as a deliberate dairy substitute until just a few decades ago. The same goes for coconut milk.) The real, homemade varieties of all these plant milks not only make for much better milk substitutes than the store-bought kinds, they also can do some things that dairy milk can’t! Coming up, I will show you some neat ways to use these qualities in baking and cooking.

Speaking of substitutions, I will be giving a presentation at the upcoming Charlotte, NC GFAF Event entitled "Recipe Remodeling: The Art and Science of Ingredient Substitution," in which I will explain how to keep the spirit of your traditional recipes even when you need to change key ingredients! The event is on Saturday, April 2nd - location and directions can be found here. I also have some tickets to give away!! If you’d like to win a ticket to the Charlotte GFAF Event, leave a comment telling me what kind of traditional dairy substitutes you want to see featured in a future recipe!

Baking history mysteries: Solved?

So, I had some oral surgery a few weeks ago and have been dealing with a diet pretty much limited to liquids, purees, and mush. (OK, technically after the first week of liquids I was also allowed very soft foods...but considering it still hurts to chew anyway, that doesn’t really expand my options a whole lot!) Basically, most of what I’ve been eating has to go through a blender, and since “Will it Blend?” is already a thing that has been thoroughly covered, I can’t really do much in terms of recipes right now. But I do have a bunch of recipe-related research to share, and the next few weeks seem like a great time to share it!  

I’ve previously mentioned my fascination with the various early American uses of rice and rice flour in baking, along with other historically-gluten-free baking. In the course of my research on this subject, I’ve come across a few unresolved mysteries with the origin of some of these recipes. I know this probably isn’t an especially compelling topic to many people other than me, but I’ve been super excited over the fact that I think I may have gotten to the bottom of a few of them! So, for any fellow food-history geeks out there, here’s what I’ve been investigating (And for the rest of you, there are also some yummy updates at the bottom of the post!):

   

Mystery #1: A set of recipes attributed to unfindable newspaper sources, purportedly decades earlier than their appearance in the Confederate Receipt Book (1862) and the Carolina Rice Cook Book (1901).

The recipes that appear in both the Confederate Receipt Book and the Carolina Rice Cook Book are the same word-for-word (well, except for the confusing omission of a couple of lines of text in Mrs Stoney’s version which results in one long, nonsensical run-on sentence of a recipe that originally was two separate recipes), and both claim to have originated from a Charleston paper. However, we know Mrs Stoney wasn’t simply repeating the information found in the CRB - there is no date given in the CRB, nor is any specific paper identified; the submitter in the Sept. 20, 1862 edition of the Mobile Register says only that “they were printed in Charleston, S.C., several years ago.” Mrs. Stoney, on the other hand, lists the source as “The Charleston Gazette, April 1830.” As Karen Hess, food historian and author of The Carolina Rice Kitchen (an excellent book, by the way, for anyone interested in food culture), has noted, this April 1830 article has not been found - nor, apparently, has any source prior to the 1862 appearance. This has led some people to speculate about the true age of the recipes.

Hess’s book was published in 1990, however, and since then, approximately a zillion old periodicals have become freely available online - and through the wonders of optical character recognition, these digitized documents are not only available, but searchable. The character recognition isn’t flawless, but between a few different snippets of the text, I was able to turn up several appearances of the article. It seems the recipes were repurposed throughout the mid-1800s, showing up attached to advertisements put out by various rice millers etc., and even collecting a few additional recipes along the way. I still did not find the Charleston source, unfortunately. But in the end, I was able to see that the original article did indeed appear in 1830...and even earlier than initially thought! In fact, the earliest printing I’ve found so far is an edition of the Philadelphia Port Folio dated March 25th 1830 - - and that article is attributed to the Charleston City Gazette, meaning it was originally printed even a little earlier still! A small thing, I know, but I was extremely excited to be able to confirm the previously-unverified age of these recipes.

Mystery #2: The origin of the upside-down rice bread.

You may have heard me mention this highly unusual, literally-topsy-turvy technique for making 100%-rice bread before - if you missed it, it’s towards the end of this video. The first English-language description of it, to my knowledge, was printed in 1796, attributed to a French periodical and, as far as I can tell, it’s a word-for-word translation. These articles claim the method comes from ‘the Americans,’ but no further context is given. But where in America? How and when was this method created? Are there other examples of upside-down baking anywhere? Searching snippets of the text only turned up later reprints of the exact same English translation - - a dead end. But then I went to the French article and employed the same method of text-searching. Well. I discovered the method seemed to have quite a history - the earliest description I found was from 1761! Subsequent descriptions were not just reprints, either - there are at least four somewhat different versions spanning 1761-1795, becoming more detailed over the years. A historical note: While the use of rice in loaf breads was far more common in the rice-growing region of America, rice breads were not unheard of in Europe despite the higher cost of rice there. Formulas for making part-rice or, more rarely, all-rice bread were published occasionally in both France and England in the later 1700s into the early 1800s, as both countries suffered frequent shortages of wheat many times in those decades, and it seems many people liked bread with some rice flour in it even after the shortages were resolved. What sets this particular recipe apart is the unusual method - and the significantly lighter crumb texture it allegedly produces, something the writer of the recipe makes sure to emphasize. Meanwhile, any attribution of this method to America doesn’t appear until a 1790 article. Earlier versions have no introduction beyond presenting a means of making bread from rice alone.

I began to question the recipe’s origins - if the method was American, why was it described in French many times across over 30 years before ever appearing in English? More troubling still is the fact that following that first English printing, a reader from South Carolina - the epicentre of American rice production and rice-based baking - sent in a letter to the editors of the publication in response, declaring the method “more complicated and tedious than that used in Carolina,” and offers his own recipe much more in line with those we later see in The Carolina Housewife, etc., which combines hand-pounded rice flour with either well-cooked corn mush or boiled potato, along with leaven and salt. (It may be noted, however, that apart from the unusual baking technique used in the previous account, the overall process of Drayton’s method is really not that different - both employ a pre-cooked starch source and sourdough-like leaven and are mixed as a batter consistency.)

Now I was even more determined to figure this out! This research was harder than the previous mystery - optical character recognition is far less helpful when searching through these older documents with their imprecise printing and antiquated spelling, not to mention the fact that the letter “s” used to look a whole lot like “f.”

Case in point: This was the result of copying text from an older version
with the antiquated typeface as shown below - the word should be "furnage,"
not "surnage." Even the typesetter got confused sometimes!

See what I mean?

After a whole lot of digging and thinking, another explanation began to look more and more possible: I have a hypothesis that this method of making rice bread may have been devised by French-speaking colonists in the territory that was then New France. Here’s my reasoning: Settlers in this area produced rice for their own use and to ship to France, and wheat did not grow well there. In Le Page du Pratz’s account of time spent in the French colony in the early 1700s, bread made of rice is clearly mentioned and said to be very white and good. Based on his description of the bread itself and the fact that the method goes unmentioned, I don’t think it’s quite the same bread. And perhaps it’s not even related to the above bread. In any case, though, it is very clear that the French colonists were creating their own rice bread traditions which developed separately from those in South Carolina, and the Louisiana colony (which, by the first attribution to “America” in 1790, was indeed no longer owned by France) seems like the likeliest French-speaking place for such a rice bread to be developed. Whatever the origins of this unusual bread, I really hope I can eventually find out more about it!

OK, enough about history for today - as promised, now here are some miscellaneous updates/pictures of things I've been making these last couple of months:

Based on one of my much older recipes, but now
without the eggs or additives. Almost there! 

More experiments in homemade natural food colorings - buttercream frosting for pumpkin cakes I made a
few months ago. This bright orange and vivid green are made entirely from scratch, not a store bought extract! 

Experiments in flaky yeasted pastry, using an unusual traditional technique to create the layers.

L: Banana bread mix from Caly's Kitchen, toasted under the broiler.
R: Rugelach recipe from Alice Medrich's "Flavor Flours."