Vegan Meringues: A Sticky Partial Fail

 Although I'm not vegan (or even vegetarian), I've been somewhat interested in vegan cooking and baking for several years.  I had read before about using the water from canned chickpeas ("aquafaba," if we're being fancy), but had been extremely skeptical until I saw it being used on The Great British Baking Show. After watching contestants construct vegan pavlovas, I decided I would try scaling down a bit to make some vegan meringues. I consulted the internet for recipe ideas and learned that in addition to using the water in canned chickpeas, I could potentially use cooking water left over from cooking dried chickpeas (or even other dried beans).  This worked for me.  I do occasionally used canned chickpeas, but more often than not, I'll just cook a batch of dried chickpeas and keep them in the freezer for when I want to use them.

It came time today to cook some more dried chickpeas, so I carefully drained them over a large bowl and let the cooking liquid cool to room temperature.  I beat the liquid in the bowl of my mixer with a little bit of cream of tartar.  It was fun to watch because they really did look like egg whites becoming fluffy.

I put them in the oven, and they became dry and even a little crispy in less time than the recipe suggested.  I tasted one, and it was a little sweet for my taste, even though I had added less sugar than the recipe called for.  Still, it was tasty and had a cool texture.

However, a few hours after taking them out of the oven, they are becoming sticky and messy.  I warned Scott that if he wanted to stress eat meringues, he would have to do so soon.  I'm thinking it's possible that the humidity is a contributing factor to the sticky mess, but I don't know.  It was an interesting experiment, but I think I have to count this as at least a partial fail and think hard about whether I want to spend precious recreational cooking time trying again.