Just Egg-speriments

As I observed during my 2020 vegan Thrift Week, there are three types of vegan dishes. Some, like  mujadara with eggplant, are inherently vegan. Some are simple adaptations of nonvegan dishes; you just leave out the meat in a stir-fry or the cheese in a burrito. And the third, the most complicated type, are the ones that try to mimic the flavors and textures of a nonvegan dish with a taste-alike substitute, like the not-zarella we now regularly use on pizza and pasta.

Unfortunately, these vegan substitutes have a few shortcomings. First, they usually aren't quite as good in taste and texture as the real thing. Also, if you make them yourself, they're anywhere from a little bit more work (like whipping up a batch of faux mozzarella) to a whole lot more work (like the veggie sausages we attempted that turned out to be not at all worth the effort). And while you can eliminate that problem by buying store-bought versions (such as almond milk or plant butter), they're generally more expensive than the animal products they replace — sometimes quite a bit more.

So when Just Egg, a plant-based egg substitute, first appeared in stores, Brian and I weren't in any hurry to try it. The price at our local supermarket was around $5 for a 12-ounce bottle equivalent to eight eggs, which works out to over 60 cents per "egg" — more than three times what we pay for Certified Humane eggs at Lidl. And given that real eggs have a pretty low carbon footprint as animal products go, we didn't have a real incentive to switch.

But when we came across a bottle of Just Egg at a nearby store for just $1.80 on sale, equivalent to 22.5 cents per egg, our curiosity got the better of us. We still didn't expect these plant-based eggs to become a regular addition to our diet, but we figured it was worth a couple of bucks to learn just how good a stand-in they were for actual chicken eggs.

For our first experiment, we tried them in a potato kugel. And as far as we could tell, they worked okay. The kugel stuck to the pan a bit, but it sometimes does that with real eggs too, so we couldn't necessarily blame the Just Eggs. And it was a little flatter than usual, but that could just have been because the potatoes were on the small side. The main thing the Just Eggs needed to do was hold the kugel together, and for that, they seemed to work just like the real thing.

So, emboldened by this qualified success, we decided to try the Just Eggs in a recipe that's a little more egg-forward: a sausage and apple omelet. We got this recipe from Olwen Woodier's Apple Cookbook, but it's extremely simple: just brown some sausage in a pan, add a few sliced scallions and a peeled, chopped apple, cook until tender, and serve in an omelet. We've tried it with real sausage from the Amish market, commercial veggie sausage from Gimme Lean, and Brian's Soy Curl sausage, but we never imagined it could be made without the egg. Would Just Egg be up to this challenge?

As it turns out, not quite. When Brian poured the Just Egg into a thin layer in the pan, it just stayed liquid and refused to set into an omelet-like sheet. Eventually, he had to stir it up because he was afraid it would burn on the bottom. So what we ended up with was more of a sausage and apple scramble than an omelet.

On the plus side, the Just Egg did make a very good substitute for scrambled eggs. The texture and the flavor were almost indistinguishable from the real thing. And the nutrition profile is pretty close, too: 5 grams of protein and 5 grams of fat per serving(but unsaturated fat, so it's even healthier than real eggs). It's negligible in terms of vitamins and minerals, but otherwise pretty healthful, as well as tasty and satisfying.

But given how much these non-eggs cost when they're not on sale, I hardly think the benefits are enough to justify purchasing them regularly. They can't do omelets, and if what we want is a scramble, we can make a pretty good one with plain old tofu. For baking, we do just fine with our other egg substitutes, such as soy flour and water or flaxseed. And for applications that call for a real egg — such as our chocolate pudding, which requires the egg to be separated — Lidl's free-range eggs are reasonably humane, reasonably low-carbon, and reasonably affordable.