This Easy Ingredient Swap Makes Cloud Bread Vegan-Friendly

The beauty of most of the past year's biggest TikTok food trends — from whipped hot chocolate and coffee to pancake cereal — is that they're easy enough to make at home. More importantly, they're easy enough for even the most amateur of cooks to master. Unfortunately, however, for as beginner-friendly as these hacks are, they aren't always vegan-friendly. Take cloud bread, for instance. The fluffy, Instagram-worthy pillows of dough have actually been around since 2016 courtesy of Pinterest but rose to social media fame over the last few months. It's praised for being a lighter and healthier alternative to the typical loaf of bread, as it's lower in carbs and higher in protein.

What makes cloud bread healthier is its few key ingredients: Sweetener, corn starch, and egg whites. The inclusion of eggs is what makes the TikTok obsession off-limits for vegans. But not all hope is lost — some bloggers have come up with a way to make cloud bread vegan. Here's what to swap in for egg whites so even those who don't consume animal products can enjoy it.

Because egg whites are the primary ingredient of cloud bread, you can't simply remove it from the recipe and hope for the best. But you can substitute something else that imitates egg whites and is vegan: aquafaba. If you've never heard of that, it's basically a fancy word for chickpea water. The blogger behind My Dainty Soul Curry explains that aquafaba has the same properties of egg whites and can be whipped into stiff peaks (which is an essential step of the cloud bread-making process). It also adds just the right amount of airiness and fluffiness so your bread won't turn out too dense.

Where do you buy aquafaba? America's Test Kitchen explains that it's simply the liquid that you drain out of a can of chickpeas. Rather than pouring it down the sink, catch in a container and use it the next time you're whipping up a batch of cloud bread.