Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jess B
Sorry kiddo, you're not going to be able to veganise that recipe. There are no egg replacers that properly duplicate the qualites of an egg to the extent that you'd be able to replace 8 eggs. Your best bet would be to find a vegan flan recipe.
To echo what Jess said - the eggs are doing several jobs in the custard.
Specifically: colour, flavour, structure and shortnening.
Ok, colour is easily fixable. The flavour is more of an issue, but then, I suspect that you'll have some flexability on that one.
The shortnening action should not be ignored (an is 12% fat, after all. As it's all in the yolk, the yolks alone will be more than that).
Structure is the critical action here. If the custard doesn't set, then you don't have a flan.
A very important point to note is that egg repacers are designed to replace the whole egg - that's quite different to just the yolk. And, they are designed for baked goods (cakes and so on). For those roles, the levening action of the egg is the most critical, thus a typical egg replacer will give you a fizzy liquid here. Not desired.
You could work through each point, and do some experimenting, till you end up with a workable recipie. However, that would end up not far from Jess' recipe I'd expect, so I'd suggest going with that, and tweaking it to get what your looking for.
I'd drop the lemon juice, and use vanilla sugar (or add vanilla essence), and a pinch of tumeric or saffron (for the colour), to get something custard tart like. Nutmeg for a flavouring agent too.
Note that the cashew nuts add a touch of fat to the mixture, which would (I think) give it a sense of richness.
With experimentation, you might be able to skip the agar, by using less liquid. This would have a much thicker gloop that you bake. Here, youre not really doing much except mixing flavouring agents into the tofu, and then baking it to reset it. (Conceptually, anyway. The devil is, as always, in the details.) That would make it closer to the other tofu based deserts I've seen. (Same principles, on a savoury bent gets you a quiche.) An example is
http://www.parsleysoup.co.uk/sweet/chocolate_mousse.htm which shows this off pretty well.
Hrm, sorry rambled a bit there. I think I stopped off at the major points though