How to bake without eggs

The majority of baking recipes, apart from breads, involve eggs in addition to ingredients like flour, sugar, butter and leavening. Eggs are crucial parts of many recipes, but with the big egg recall going on, you might want to consider some options for egg free baking. Cooking eggs thoroughly and washing your hands when handling eggs should drastically reduce your odds of having a food safety problem at home. That said, it is always good to have options if you don’t want to use eggs for a while or want to do some baking and just noticed that your last dozen is part of the recall.

Eggs act as binders, thickeners and as leavening agents in recipes like cakes and cookies. They do a lot, so taking eggs out of a dish is not as simple as just omitting them from a recipe as written – especially if that recipe calls for more than one egg. You can substitute your eggs with an egg replacer, a common vegan baking technique that calls for using a mixture of ingredients to mimic the function of eggs (like adding 1 tbsp of cornstarch or potato starch mixed with 1 tbsp water), which works fairly well in many cookie and quickbread recipes, especially when just substituting one egg. Another easy thing to do is to simply choose recipes that don’t use eggs in the first place and start baking them while you wait for the recall to pass.

There are plenty of cookie recipes that don’t use eggs to begin with. Shortbread is a great example, and there are many variations on the classic shortbread to try. Many chocolate chip cookies will work well with the egg replacer suggested above.

There is a popular eggless chocolate cake recipe that started out as a war-time recipe when eggs were scarce. Often called Wacky Cake, this egg-free type of chocolate cake calls for vinegar, which reacts with baking soda in the cake batter to give the cake plenty of lift for a tender, rich-tasting cake. You can use this technique in a Chocolate Bundt Cake, a Chocolate Layer Cake or even in Chocolate Cupcakes. You won’t have a problem coming up with a frosting that is egg free to top them off with! Chocolate Pudding Cake is a completely different type of chocolate cake that also uses no eggs.

And since we’re on the subject of eggless baking, don’t forget that most pie recipes don’t use any eggs in the first place and are great choices for egg-free baking. The same goes for tart recipes, like this Cream Cheese Key Lime Pie, and Tarte Tatin.