How To Make A Perfect Flax Egg (For Vegan Baking)

Vegan baking can be intimidating. I know better. At the beginning of my healthy cooking journey I didn’t even care for vegan baking. In my mind baking involved eggs, butter, milk and cream. Considering that these ingredients are off-limits for vegans I thought: why even bother baking? If you can’t use proper ingredients just don’t bake, do something else instead.
I was mistaken all along. There’s nothing wrong with vegan baking. To the contrary, it's awesome. To non-vegans (like myself) it represents a further option to bring different flavors, textures, and nutrients to “regular” baking.
For the most part vegan baking entails just a simple 1:1 substitution on specific ingredients. Plant milk for dairy milk and plant fat for butter. With eggs, however, it gets a bit more tricky.
If you’ve encountered vegan recipes before, you’ll know that, most of times, they call for “flax eggs”.
The majority would think that it’s some expensive product you can buy at specialty shops. It’s really not. Making flax eggs is “easy peasy”. All you need is some flax seeds and water. In a matter of minutes you’ll have vegan egg substitutes that will “act” as a binder in your recipes, just as regular eggs.


Flax Egg                                                                                                                                                   Print this Recipe!
Adapted from The 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes and Bonzai Aphrodite

Ingredients
Makes one flax egg

1 tablespoon whole, raw flax seeds
3 tablespoon cold water

Directions

Place flax seeds in a grinder (or a blender) and process into a very fine powder.



In a small bowl add flax meal, followed by water, stirring well as you go. A fork works better than a spoon.


Refrigerate for 15 minutes, but 1 hour is best. There’s no skipping this step. The flax eggs needs to set, get thick and sticky (something similar to egg whites).
When it reaches this gluey state the flax egg will act as a binder, just like egg whites.


Now you can use it in your recipes!

Notes

Make your flax eggs before everything else when vegan baking. This way, you'll give them the time to set and they will be ready when needed.
Also, you don’t need to make one flax egg at a time, you can make as many as necessary.
Flax egg has a nutty flavor. This doesn’t come up in recipes that call for ingredients with strong flavors, such as chocolate, pumpkin, spices, and the like. However, in milder ones, such as sugar cookies, it will pop-up a bit.
Finally, don’t try whipping flax egg. It just won’t happen. There’s no making vegan meringues with flax eggs.