Posted 2026-05-29, last edited 2026-05-29.
tl;dr: From 400 grams of chickpeas was strained 200 ml of aquafaba, which was mixed with an electric hand mixer for 5 minutes on its own and a further 15 while slowly adding in 250 ml of granulated white sugar (you can get away with less, I would now suggest using the same volume of sugar as aquafaba or even a little less), mixing until the liter of mixture doesn't pour out when upturned; the mixture was shaped into meringues and baked at 85-ish °C for about three hours in total, until crispy throughout; the resulting product surprisingly doesn't taste of chickpea at all.
I decided to give vegan aquafaba meringues a try. It's a surprisingly simple process! I've always thought that meringues are an intimidatingly hard food for a novice cook to make, but with aquafaba, it's really just a matter of patience rather than technique. Aquafaba is the watery juice that is left over in a can of chickpeas or beans, and one of the great food science discoveries of the 2010s is that the proteins in it act very similarly to egg white protein. I'm not posting a picture of the meringues I made, since they just came out as round white blobs, about three inches across and one inch high, no color variation – they look like homemade meringues.
The only equipment requirements are a big enough bowl, an electic hand mixer, a baking tray, and an oven that can reliably hold temperatures roughly in the 80–90 °C range. With homemade meringues a lack of temperature precision is fine, as long as the temperature doesn't get much hotter than that. I didn't use forced convection.
From a 380-gram tetra pak of chickpeas I got about 200 ml of aquafaba, maybe a bit less. I strained the chickpeas directly through a strainer into my mixing vessel, to avoid chickpea chunks from getting in.
I then whisked them with the electric hand mixer for five minutes. During this time, the volume of the aquafaba grew fourfold. I then started spooning in ordinary granulated sugarbeet-based white sugar, a dinner spoonful at a time, gradually, continuously mixing. I eventually used 250 ml sugar, but the resulting meringues came out too sweet for my taste, so next time I would probably use 150 ml. By the time I had mixed in all of the sugar, the volume of the mixture was slightly over a liter, so the aquafaba had expanded fivefold.
Adding in vinegar, lemon juice, or cream of tartar is completely unnecessary, you only need the aquafaba and sugar. My source for this is I tried it without any additives of that kind and it worked.
And here's where the patience comes in. I ended up mixing the mixture for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes in total. Recipes online call for you to whisk until you get "stiff peaks"; I don't know how to recognize how stiff the peaks have to be, so I went with the rule that you should be able to turn the vessel upside down without the mixture pouring out or moving much, and then I whisked a minute more. I probably should have given it another minute or two. Mix it until it's mixed and then mix it some more.
Then, using a spoon, I formed the mixture into dollops on a baking sheet covered with baking parchment. I got sixteen large meringues; that 200 ml of aquafaba really made plenty, it was almost too much to fit on the one sheet. The meringues did melt a bit in the oven and fuse, so if this is to be avoided, make less of the stuff or use two trays.
I baked them at about 85 or 90 °C (it's hard to tell from my dial, I didn't have an oven thermometer) for about 100 minutes. After taking them out of the oven, they are still soft, and they will firm up while cooling, but I found that they were still too soft to my liking so the next morning I baked them for another one and a half hours at the same temperature, so three hours total, and then I turned off the oven and let it cool with the meringues still inside, only taking them out an hour later. This made them crispy throughout, except for a slight chewy bit in the bottom center, which maybe another half hour to an hour of baking would have eliminated – but the chewy bit is also tasty!
And to address the "do they taste like chickpea" question: surprisingly, no! The raw aquafaba mixture does taste of it; the more you whisk it and the larger it expands, the more the taste is diluted, but the mixture will still taste of chickpea. After I baked them for the first one and a half hours and tasted, they did still have a slight note of chickpea to their taste, with more of the taste in the chewier bits. But after another hour of baking, and letting them rest after baking, the chickpea taste was basically gone, they just taste of sugar and crunchiness. (And honestly, I prefer a side taste of chickpea over a side taste of egg white; egg white tastes yuckier to my tongue than bean juice does.)
This was a very promising experiment, and very easy to pull off; no separating egg yolks, no icky egg flavor, no strict salmonella hygiene controls. I'm next interested in trying this with other aquafabas (aquaefabae?); I've read some place that the water from other beans works just as well, leaving equally little bean-taste afterwards, but that kidney bean water and black bean water will leave the meringues stained pink or grey, which might be quite cool actually.