How do I go about substituting gelatine sheets for a vegetarian setting agent?
Sarah, Aberdeen
“The truth is, there’s no exact substitute for gelatine, because it has an incredibly unique texture,” says Richard Phillips, head of pastry at Timberyard in Edinburgh. Sure, there are plenty of plant-based gelling agents out there – “agar-agar [or just agar], gellan gum, pectin, carrageenan, locust bean gum, vege-gel… the list goes on,” says Phillips – but the result will never quite be the same.
“The temperature you have to use them at is different [to gelatine],” says Philip Khoury, author of Beyond Baking, so his usual workaround is to simply formulate recipes that don’t use gelling agents. Now, that’s all well and good when you’re a pastry chef, but what about the rest of us? “If, for example, I’m making a thick, pipeable cream, then I’ll use cornflour,” says Khoury, and just manipulate it to get different textures. Let’s take the panna cotta and creme brulee recipes in his first book, A New Way to Bake, as an example: “You get two very different textures from essentially the same recipe. The only difference being that if you pour the custard into a tray and chill it, it will set, whereas if you beat it with a whisk, it will turn into this luscious, creamy texture that’s just set.”
