How To Make Vegan Meringue Cookies

Let me preach the meringue cookie gospel for a moment here. Meringues are light and airy, with a just-right sweetness, and they melt in your mouth with their crisp-tender texture. They are made with just three ingredients, one of which is a leftover byproduct of a kitchen staple.

If you were thinking these pretty, tasty things were made from egg whites, you were wrong. These meringues are made from the leftover liquid from a can of chickpeas, whipped and baked up much like their namesake cousins, but made for vegans. It’s not quite magic — it’s thanks to the starchy science of aquafaba.

Aquafaba refers to the liquid from cooking any dried bean or legume. Beans leach proteins and carbohydrates into the water they’re cooked in, which transforms that water into a substance rich in those nutrients and ripe for whipping.

While aquafaba can come from canned or stovetop cooked beans, most aquafaba-based recipes call for the liquid from canned chickpeas. Chickpeas have a nice neutral flavor that can be easily enhanced or disguised, but the aquafaba from canned chickpeas also has reliably consistent starch content, making for a more dependable whipped product.

Read more: Aquafaba, the Most Magical Egg Replacement (and How to Use It)

Yes, but it may take a bit of experimenting with your favorite chickpea cooking method to find the right consistency. Aquafaba-based meringues require a certain starch-to-water content, which varies widely depending on the dried chickpea cooking method. Some aquafaba enthusiasts suggest draining your chickpeas and then reducing the cooking liquid by half to mimic the starchy power of the canned byproduct.

Unlike egg whites, which require certain temperatures and ultra-clean equipment for whipping, vegan meringues require less precision but more muscle. Here’s what you need to know for light and fluffy vegan meringues.

• Use an electric hand or stand mixer to whip. You need the power of an electric mixer to whip aquafaba, because it is thinner than egg whites and needs more muscle to whip it into shape.
• Always add cream of tartar. Cream of tartar helps stabilize whipped foams, and this trick is true for egg white and aquafaba meringues.
• Add the sugar gradually. Adding the sugar in small doses once the aquafaba has some air whipped into it prevents the sugar crystals from breaking down the air bubbles.
• Bake until dry. Some meringue recipes can be baked just until set with a marshmallow-like center, but vegan meringues should be baked until completely dry, about an hour, to prevent collapse.

Troubleshooting your aquafaba: 5 Reasons Your Aquafaba Won’t Whip

Not all granulated sugars are considered vegan. Bone char (an animal byproduct) is often used in the whitening and refining process for granulated sugar. Many vegan bakers prefer unrefined cane sugars like demerara or turbinado. There are sugar companies skipping the bone char refining process, so you can always look for vegan sugar in granulated, brown sugar, or powdered sugar options.