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PORTSIDE CULTURE

SCIENTISTS ARE TRYING TO CRACK THE RECIPE FOR THE PERFECT PLANT-BASED
EGGS  
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Bob Holmes
December 2, 2025
Smithsonian Magazine
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_ With new ingredients and processes, the next generation of
substitutes will be not just more egg-like, but potentially more
nutritious _

The plant-based egg substitutes available today are less than
perfect. Food scientists are working hard to improve them — and,
maybe, make them better tasting and more nutritious than the real
thing. , Knowable Magazine

 

The plant-based egg substitutes available today are less than perfect.
Food scientists are working hard to improve them — and, maybe, make
them better tasting and more nutritious than the real thing. Knowable
Magazine

An egg is an amazing thing, culinarily speaking: delicious, nutritious
and versatile. Americans eat nearly 100 billion of them every year,
almost 300 per person. But eggs, while greener than other animal food
sources, have a bigger environmental footprint than almost any plant
food—and industrial egg production raises significant animal
welfare issues
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So food scientists, and a few companies, are trying hard to come up
with ever-better plant-based egg substitutes. “We’re trying to
reverse-engineer an egg,” says David Julian McClements
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a food scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

That’s not easy, because real eggs play so many roles in the
kitchen. You can use beaten eggs to bind breadcrumbs in a coating, or
to hold together meatballs; you can use them to emulsify oil and water
into mayonnaise, scramble them into an omelet, or whip them to loft a
meringue or angel food cake. An all-purpose egg substitute must do all
those things acceptably well, while also yielding the familiar texture
and—perhaps—flavor of real eggs.

Today’s plant-based eggs still fall short of that one-size-fits-all
goal, but researchers in industry and academia are trying to improve
them. New ingredients and processes are leading toward egg substitutes
that are not just more egg-like, but potentially more nutritious and
better tasting than the original.

In practice, making a convincing plant-based egg is largely a matter
of mimicking the way the ovalbumin and other proteins in real eggs
behave during cooking. When egg proteins are heated beyond a critical
point, they unfold and grab onto one another, forming what food
scientists call a gel. That causes the white and then the yolk to set
up when cooked.

That’s not easy to replicate with some plant proteins, which tend to
have more sulfur-containing amino acids than egg proteins do. These
sulfur groups bind to each other, so the proteins unfold at higher
temperatures. As a result, they must usually be cooked longer and
hotter than ones in real eggs.

To make a plant-based egg, food scientists typically start by
extracting a mix of proteins from a plant source such as soybean, mung
bean or other crops. “You want to start with what is a sustainable,
affordable and consistent source of plant proteins,” says
McClements, who wrote about the design of plant-based foods in the
2024 Annual Review of Food Science and Technology. “So you’re
going to narrow your search to that group of proteins that are
economically feasible to use.”

Fortunately, some extracts are dominated by one or a few proteins that
set at low-enough temperatures to behave pretty much like real egg
proteins. Current plant-based eggs rely on these proteins: Just Egg
uses the plant albumins and globulin found in mung bean extract,
Simply Eggless uses proteins from lupin beans, and McClements and
others are experimenting with the photosynthetic enzyme rubisco that
is abundant in duckweed and other leafy tissues.

These days, food technologists can produce a wide range of proteins in
large quantities by inserting the gene for a selected protein into
hosts like bacteria or yeast, then growing the hosts in a tank, a
process called precision fermentation. That opens a huge new window
for exploration of other plant-based protein sources that may more
precisely match the properties of actual eggs.

A few companies are already searching. Shiru, a California-based
biotech company, for example, uses a sophisticated artificial
intelligence platform to identify proteins with specific properties
from its database of more than 450 million natural protein sequences.
To find a more egglike plant protein, the company first picked the
criteria it needed to match. “For eggs, that is the thermal gel
onset—that is, when it goes from liquid to solid when you heat
it,” says Jasmin Hume, a protein engineer who is the company’s
founder and CEO. “And it must result in the right texture—not too
hard, not too gummy, not too soft.” Those properties depend on
details such as which amino acids a protein contains, in what order,
and precisely how it folds into a 3D structure—a hugely complex
process that was the subject of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The company then scoured its database, winnowing it down to a short
list that it predicted would fit the bill. Technicians produced those
proteins and tested their properties, pinpointing a handful of
potential egglike proteins. A few were good enough to start the
company working to commercialize their production, though Hume
declined to provide further details.

Cracking the flavor code

With the main protein in hand, the next step for food technologists is
to add other molecules that help make the product more egglike. Adding
vegetable oils, for example, can change the texture. “If I don’t
put any oil in the product, it’s going to scramble more like an egg
white,” says Chris Jones, a chef who is vice president of product
development at Eat Just, which produces the egg substitute Just Egg.
“If I put 8 to 15 percent, it’s going to scramble like a whole
egg. If I add more, it’s going to behave like a batter.”

Developers can also add gums to prevent the protein in the mixture
from settling during storage, or they can add molecules that are
translucent at room temperature but turn opaque when cooked, providing
the same visual cue to doneness that real eggs provide.

And then there’s the taste: Current plant-based eggs often suffer
from off flavors. “Our first version tasted like what you imagine
the bottom of a lawn mower deck would taste like — really grassy,”
says Jones. The company’s current product, version five, still has
some beany notes, he says.

Those beany flavors aren’t caused by a single molecule, says Devin
Peterson, a flavor chemist at Ohio State University: “It’s a
combination that creates beany.” Protein extracts from legumes
contain enzymes that create some of these off-flavor volatile
molecules—and it’s a painstaking process to single out the
offending volatiles and avoid or remove them, he says. (Presumably,
cooking up single proteins in a vat could reduce this problem.) Many
plant proteins also have molecules called polyphenols bound to their
surfaces that contribute to beany flavors. “It’s very challenging
to remove these polyphenols, because they’re tightly stuck,” says
McClements.

Experts agree that eliminating beany and other off flavors is a good
thing. But there’s less agreement on whether developers need to
actively make a plant-based egg taste more like a real egg.
“That’s actually a polarizing question,” says Jones.

Much of an egg’s flavor comes from sulfur compounds that aren’t
necessarily pleasing to consumers. “An egg tastes a certain way
because it’s releasing sulfur as it decays,” says Jones. When
tasters were asked to compare Eat Just’s egg-free mayonnaise against
the traditional, real-egg version, he notes, “at least 50 percent
didn’t like the sulfur flavor of a true-egg mayo.”

That poses a quandary for developers. “Should it have a sulfur
flavor, or should it have its own point of view, a flavor that our
chefs develop? We don’t have an answer yet,” Jones says. Even for
something like an omelet, he says, developers could aim for “a
neutral spot where whatever seasoning you add is what you’re going
to taste.”

As food technologists work to overcome these challenges, plant-based
eggs are likely to get better and better. But the ultimate goal might
be to surpass, not merely match, the performance of real eggs.
Already, McClements and his colleagues have experimented with adding
lutein, a nutrient important for eye health, to oil droplets in
plant-based egg yolks.

In the future, scientists could adjust the amino acid composition of
proteins or boost the calcium or iron content in plant-based eggs to
match nutritional needs. “We ultimately could engineer something
that’s way healthier than what’s available now,” says Bianca
Datta, a food scientist at the Good Food Institute, an international
nonprofit focused on advancing alternative proteins. “We’re just
at the beginning of seeing what’s possible.”

 

* plant-based
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* eggs
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* flavor chemists
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* flavorists
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