Which Egg Substitute Made the Best Cake? | Gemma’s Test Kitchen

Hi, I'm professional chef Gemma Stafford and welcome to my test kitchen. This is where my team and I have fun experimenting, geeking out and answering a lot of your baking questions. We have a brand new test for you this week and I'm really excited to share it. So Ami, come over and tell us what we're doing. Hi, so today we're going to be testing egg substitutes. It's something that we mentioned on our last episode and we looked down at your comments and saw that some of you are also interested in what we can use to substitute eggs in cake making. So we have a variety of egg substitutes here. These are the ones that are most popular on the internet. We're going to try each to see what works best. Okay Zach, come here to me. The first one we're going to talk about is applesauce. Applesauce has a lot of pectin in it so it's really great for binding the cake and giving it structure as well as a lot of moisture which will help the cake rise. The great thing about applesauce I find is that I have a three-year-old so I always have applesauce. It's shelf-stable and it's inexpensive. So you know when these things are accessible it makes it easy. And then next we're going to add in our dry ingredients. Okay, ready for it? I'll just do a little bit at a time. Get it all together. Perfect. You can just dump the rest in Ami. And this is just a standard pound cake. You can do the same for any cake recipe. Okay, lovely. One batter. One egg substitute ready. All right, that looks good. I'll get that ready for the oven. And next we're going to do bananas. Bananas have a lot of moisture content similar to eggs which is going to create steam and help the cake rise. Now you can really smell the banana which makes me feel like this would be great if you want the flavor of banana in your cake. But if you really want a neutral cake I wonder if it's going to be a little too flavorful. One of the reasons I like banana as a substitute is that it's inexpensive and just like the applesauce I always have them in my house. Just like you do with a banana bread if you've got overripe bananas you just throw them in your freezer and then you always have a really great egg substitute anytime you want it. Okay, so next we're going to try silken tofu. So I've taken this tofu and blended it so when it's a very soft form of tofu. Tofu has a nice creamy texture and similar to that of an egg. It's going to add a lot of moisture and I suspect that the protein in tofu is also going to help bind the cake together and provide structure as it bakes. I'm excited to see the results of this one. I do love silken tofu. In one of my favorite restaurants here in LA they have a lovely dish. I've never had it in a bake. Have you had it in a baked good? No I haven't but I think it has a nice neutral flavor unlike the applesauce and the banana so I have high hopes for this one. Yeah the one thing about this is it's you know similar consistency to an egg so it'll be interesting to see the results of this one. Are you ready for the dry? Yes please. Okay. All right I'm gonna go grab the pan for that. It looks like we're just about mixed. Yeah nice and creamy right? Look at how smooth that looks. Is that any different? Yeah it looks really, it already looks much nicer. The batter looks so smooth. The thing about silken tofu we did have to go to a few supermarkets to get it so not as easily accessible. Now do you think a firm tofu would work if you blended it? That's a very good question. The answer is no. Don't do that. Don't use a firm tofu. No. All right. You just told us no. Okay there you go. That looks great. All right so next we're going to use yogurt. It's a full fat yogurt and yogurt you probably know is a pretty common ingredient in cake making. But this time around we're going to see what happens if we use a little more of it to replace any eggs that we would be using otherwise. The one nice thing about yogurt is that it tenderizes the flour as you use it so it makes a lovely softer cake. When yogurt is used to substitute egg we use plain yogurt and not Greek because Greek is thicker. Yogurt is also going to add, I don't know if you mentioned this Gemma, it also has a lot of moisture. As you can see there's a theme of moisture. Eggs contribute a lot of moisture to any baked good. One of what happens is the moisture when you're baking the cake creates steam and the steam allows the cake to rise or anything you're baking to rise. So you really want one of the main functions of egg is the moisture it adds. Well that looks really nice too. It does. Look at that. The nice thing about yogurt is that it's not going to add any extra flavor. Right. And it will add moisture. And also if it does add any sort of a flavor it's going to add a subtle tang which will be delicious. Yeah it will be lovely. And just so you know if you don't have yogurt you can also substitute buttermilk, the same amount of buttermilk and that works really well too. Could you use sour cream? Oh of course you could use sour cream, yeah. Or you could use sour cream. That's a good one. Alright that's done. And next. Thank you very much. Next we are going to substitute flax egg. Now this is a really popular substitute for eggs. Actually you know flax works for a lot of different baked goods. Not every substitute works in everything. Flax is great for cookies, brownies, cakes. You can put that in there Ami. And I want to talk a little bit about flax egg and how you make it. Now you see how thick that is? This has been sitting around, I think I need a spatula. So to make a flax egg you mix one tablespoon of ground flax meal with two and a half tablespoons of water and you let that sit. This has been sitting for about a half an hour and that's what's giving it a nice viscosity. It's really similar to an egg white. The word of today is viscosity. Flax egg is also a fantastic substitute when using an egg substitute for cookies. So I think you know overall this one is a really popular one. So let's see compared to the others how this fares. Also FYI flax are more expensive. A little bit more of a specialty item and not every household has them. Alright last but not least we have condensed milk. This one I thought was a little interesting. Condensed milk is very thick and creamy. A lot of moisture as you can see. It's a cooked down milk but the thing that I wonder about is it also has a lot of sugar in it. So you would probably need to adjust the sugar of any recipe you would use condensed milk in as an egg substitute. Okay so ready for the flour? Just so you know all these egg substitutes and their uses can be found on my website. I have an amazing chart there. It's one of the most visited posts on my website. It's an egg substitute chart. Is that a humble brag? Is that what that's called? Alright that one's done. Okey dokey. Well that looks nice. It looks nice and smooth doesn't it? Yeah. So here we have our six different tests. Stay tuned because we're going to get them into the oven and then we're going to do a side by side comparison to see what's the best egg substitute for cakes. So all our pancakes came out of the oven and they look dramatically different. They really do. I'm pretty surprised. So let's just do a quick run through. We're going to grade these and figure out what is the best egg substitute. The first thing we're going to grade it on is look. Ommy let's go down the line here. The fruit. Apple and banana. What do you think these look like? Well they both browned pretty nicely. They kind of have a nice caramelly top. It didn't rise much. Yeah that sank in the middle. So they look okay. I think the banana looks a little better than the apple. It does. It does. That looks like a nice enough loaf. Apple sunk a little bit. Let's move down here. Silk and tofu. Silk and tofu looks really nice. It has a nice domed top. It's a little pale but that doesn't bother me with pound cakes so much. Yeah. The yogurt on the other hand I'm surprised it sank in the middle. It sank. It wrinkled lots. It didn't brown and it just kind of like got a little bit hard and funky. It collapsed a little bit. Yeah. Like it couldn't really. Maybe the yogurt was a little too wet. Yeah. Or something. And I know you can't see this but it's kind of like a little bit firmer than the other cakes. Now let's talk about flax egg. Supposed to be one of the best egg substitutes but check this out. It looks bizarre. It's so different to what a pound cake should look like. It almost looks like it's a blondie or something. It does. But it's like it's very hard. It took a long time to bake. It was very wet the dough. It took about half an hour longer than the rest of the pound cakes took. And yeah. Very strange. Yeah. And you can feel it had to bake that much longer. And then lastly condensed milk. I don't think this one's going to work at all. I mean I'm not even sure. To be honest it cooked in the inside because the outside started burning after almost two hours in the oven. And the inside never really fully finished baking. Yeah. So now take a look at the one that we made with eggs. Proper pound cake. And look at the difference. It has popped up on top. It's domed. It has this lovely like color all over. Exactly what you want in a pound cake. Okay now let's get to the real meat of this. The inside. We're going to cut it all open and we're going to talk about flavor. So the second thing we're grading them on is texture. Let's talk applesauce. Very different. Very dense. Didn't bake. And this is supposed to bake an hour like all the other ones. Looks so gummy. Look at that. It's like you know and the cake tester didn't show any crumbs so it looked like it was going to be cooked all the way through but yeah and it sank. And it sank. So banana. Let's talk about banana. So now banana actually looks really nice which is you know it's you can see it there it's still pretty moist down here. There's you know maybe it could have cooked off a little more but the crumb is nice. It has a nice dense tight crumb. I have high hopes for this one. Great. Silken tofu. Do you know what? Silken tofu. A little bit doughy down here. Maybe too much moisture in the tofu but actually not too bad. I have to say this is not terrible. I would eat this. I wouldn't think that was raw cake. I would eat it. Okey dokey. Yogurt. Yeah so this was so surprised because I know yogurt is used in baking especially in cakes all the time but look at how wet it is on the inside. Yeah the yogurt gave results of a very wet pound cake. Obviously too much moisture. Straight off the bat that just does not seem to work. Right and you can tell with all the moisture it couldn't it collapsed and I think that's one of the reasons why it sank. It was just it was too much for the structure of the cake. Yeah. Next flax egg. This is very surprising so it cooked all the way through. It did so it's not doughy. It's moist but it is a little bit very crispy because it stayed in the oven for longer so it's all crispy around the outside so not a soft fluffy pound cake that we're used to. And then finally our condensed milk cake which is I mean first of all it took a very long time to cook and then when we finally decided to pull it out of the oven because the outside was burning we cut it open and it is very gummy and dense looking. It's um you know not even I wouldn't even I don't know if I'd consider this a cake. No it's not. Okay. Okay that's our texture. The last test we're going to do is we're going to grade them on taste so let's do a quick taste of each one. Okay applesauce. Flavor's good. Not appley. I think it does actually taste pretty appley to me. Does it? So it tastes underdone. You ate the raw bit. Well I mean it just it just it tastes it's a gummy. It's a little gummy tasting. It has an apple flavor but it's actually nice. I think I don't mind the apple flavor but if you want a neutral flavor you're not going to get it. Applesoso. Yeah. Okay let's do a little bit of banana bread. Soft. Crispy on the outside. It tastes like banana bread though. It's delicious. Good. It's really good. Good. So far I think banana bread. It's really sweet. Is in the lead. I would put if you were to do banana substitute I would pull back a little bit on the sugar. I think it's a little sweet. It is sweet. Silken tofu. Same like pancake flavor. Soft texture. It's very soft. It's very tender. Very tender. Which is not a bad thing. I think it's almost too tender. No olive-y. It's almost too tender. I want a little more structure to the cake. I can almost taste the tofu but it's subtle. I think if you had whipped cream and fruit you wouldn't so much. You can taste this one. Come on Gemma. No you can tell me how. I'm gonna taste a little bit over here. This is yogurt. I think we already can move on from this one. No. It's raw dough. Tastes the best. I mean flavor-wise. Flavor-wise. No no texture is all wrong. However it tastes most like pancake. I'm just saying. I disagree with that. Well. Flax egg. Okay this will be interesting. It does have a nice neutral taste but a weird texture because it's very fluffy on the inside but then very crunchy on the edges. Not the normal characteristics of a pancake. Condensed milk? You know what? I'm gonna give us a pass here. Really? We don't need to taste this. It's obviously way too sweet. This was just a no-go. You can taste it if you want to. I'm gonna try it. It's not pancake. I'd say it's closer to blondie. So maybe if you want to make a blondie with condensed milk you might try it. But you might want to pull back on the sugar. But it actually gives a real caramel flavor which is nice. Kind of like a dulce de leche. Okay not pancake. Out of these six, tell me what is you know one being the highest, lowest, ten being the highest. What's what is your success story here? I want to say somewhere between the tofu and the banana. The tofu was a little too tender for me. I like the banana but it tastes like banana. It doesn't taste like pound cake. So I'm going to say tofu. So tofu. What's the least one? The condensed milk. Okay. I would say I agree with you. I'm going to say banana bread. Pound cake. Banana bread, pound cake. Yeah. And obviously the condensed milk is just you're just terrible. Yeah did not work. So that's it. So our expert opinion says if you want to substitute eggs in pound cake or any type of cake, silken tofu, mashed banana, have at it. You should get pretty good results. So that was our experiment to see what egg substitutes work best in pound cake. We really hope you guys enjoyed it. I learned a lot. I certainly did too. Let us know in the crazy baking experiments you'd like to see come out of our test kitchen and we'll see you back here again really soon. See ya. Bye bye. I'm going to have more banana bread. I think I will.