You've seen those videos of people using the water from a can of garbanzo beans to make meringue, right? Well I got bored, and I was making some hummus and thought, oh what the hell. I saved the bean-juice and poured it into my standing mixer.
1/2 cup bean water
1/2 cup + 2 Tbsp granulated sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1/4 tsp. almond extract
I whipped everything together on the highest speed for ten or fifteen minutes, adding the sugar slowly a spoonful at a time:
And holy carp, it worked! It made stiffer, more stable peaks than egg whites do:
So I figured I'd go with some macarons. I put the meringue into a pastry bag and piped them out onto a sheet of parchment paper. I made cups out of some, disks out of others, and ladyfingers out of still more. It made dozens of cookies, people. DOZENS.
Then I baked them in my oven's lowest setting (I think it was 200 degrees F) for 45 minutes. Then I turned the oven off and let them cool in the oven for another hour and a half or so, until they were completely dry and crisp:
While they were drying, I made some fillings. For the cup-shaped cookies, I just phoned it in and filled them with some strawberry jam. For the disks, I made a dough out of 1 part maple syrup and 3 parts chunky peanut butter, and sandwiched it between two of the little "macarons" I had made. And for the ladyfingers, I got all kinds of fancy: I made a paste out of 1 part honey and 1 part tahini, spread it in a thin layer across the top of the ladyfingers, and then pressed the cookie into a bowl of toasted sesame seeds:
I'm not going to say they were "just as good" as the same cookies would have been if they were made from egg. But the flavor is pretty danged close, and the texture is a little crispier.
Next time, I'm going to skip the vanilla and almond extracts, and use peppermint instead.
