Lazy Vegan Friday – Vegan Egg from Follow Your Heart

We’re in New York City for the holidays again, and paid a visit to Haymaker’s Corner – an all vegan grocery store in Brooklyn, NY. We had pre-ordered a holiday meal from them, and some stuff from Vegan Treats – and luckily, the night before, they also got in a shipment of Follow Your Heart’s new(ish) Vegan Egg. I also ordered two boxes from Rabbit Food Grocery in Austin and had it shipped to NYC.

At the moment if you wanted to order it to Canada, Vegan Essentials and Food Fight Grocery are the only two places I’ve seen offering this product with shipping to Canadian addresses.

Like I mentioned when reviewing The Vegg, I never liked cheese, which seems like the ubiquitous missed vegan item (though that’s changed with all the amazing alternatives) but I have missed the occasional scrambled or over-easy egg. Of course – never enough to consider eating a non-vegan egg. So when I saw this product appear online during the Supply Side West convention in Las Vegas earlier this year, I was pretty excited to find out more.

The Vegg is great for those over easy eggs yolks I was missing (with some spherification), but did not work out quite as well as I hoped as a scramble. The promo images from the trade show showed the VeganEgg was something that could be scrambled with a similar looking texture, so I was curious and interested in trying it, and ever since have been trying to figure out an effective way of getting some into my grubby little hands.

I started harassing Follow Your Heart online to find out when it would be in Canada and when we could start selling it at the V Word Market, and they mentioned that they were aiming to have Canadian compliant labels in 2016. I’m interested in how they’ll go about this for a couple of reasons – Follow Your Heart has to use Earth Island in Canada, because they can’t have “Heart” in their name but they did mention they were planning on calling it VeganEgg in Canada as well, so we’ll see how that plays out this year. But I’m optimistic.

What’s in the box?

I wondered when I saw the cartons if this would be a liquid or a powdered product. Well, it’s a powder!

Ingredients

Whole algal flour, whole algal protein, modified cellulose, cellulose, gellan gum, calcium lactate (plant source), carrageenan, nutritional yeast, black salt.

What do you need?

• a Tablespoon
• Ice Cold Water
• A whisk

Directions

The folks at Follow Your Heart helpfully put out a video for how to make a VeganEgg Scramble – but it is very straightforward.

I had left a cup with 1 cup of water in it in the fridge over night because I wanted to make sure the water was cold enough. The Box recommends ice cold water, so that’s what I was aiming for. From what I’m hearing this is essential to making the optimal vegan egg.

Then I poured 4 tbsp of the VeganEgg powder into my ice cold water and started whisking. And ended up with a jar of something that looked a lot like what I remember of scrambled chicken eggs, or something you might pour out of a premixed egg carton.

I had a frying pan on a gas stove, heat up while I was whisking, so I would be ready to pour it in the pan as soon as everything was mixed together smoothly.

I poured the blended VeganEgg into the frying pan, and started stirring it right away. There is a bit of a black salt smell (aka, sulfur, aka “eggy”) as the mixture was whisking, and for the first minute or two in the frying pan, but it dissipated quickly and any remaining flavour was relatively subtle in the finished product.

I paired it with a slice of oatmeal pie from Veestro, a pair of fried up Yeah Dawgs, and some hash browns. And breakfast was good. Very good.

What did it taste like?

I think the texture was very on point, from the whisking to the end product, it was a convincing egg-like product. The cooked flavour was quite accurate too. Eggs without any seasoning can be relatively boring – this was no different, it could have used a bit more salt, pepper, and maybe some chives (or other veggies), but it’s a promising base to build from and over all, I’m looking forward to working with this product more.

Where to find it?

For now it’s available at some Vegan Groceries in the USA, on Amazon, and is spreading through other sales locations as time passes. You can find a list here from Follow Your Heart. If you wanted to order it to Canada, at the moment, Vegan Essentials and Food Fight Grocery are the only two places I’ve seen offering this product with shipping to Canadian addresses. Hopefully more soon.

Have you tried this yet? What did you think?