Late to the Party posts are about first time experiences with products or brands that have been around for a while.
Just Egg, a plant-based egg substitute, is made from mung bean. If this is the first time you’ve ever heard of mung bean, I want to let you know that I was in your shoes back in 2018 when I first read about this product. If you’d like to take up some space in your brain to learn about it, here’s the Wikipedia link.
While I’ve known about Just Egg for years and have wanted to try it for the same amount of time, I just never came across it. That ended while pushing my virtual cart through the aisles of my local Whole Foods via the Amazon website to find out what kinds of dairy-free milk alternatives it offers. (Side note: It’s A LOT.)
Why would I want to try not-eggs? While some people are fascinated with Star Wars, I’m that way with products that attempt to recreate meat and animal products using plants. Yes, you’ll regret asking me what my hobbies are at a party.
While an egg is just, well, an egg, Just Egg has (takes a deep breath) water, mung bean protein isolate, expeller-pressed canola oil, dehydrated onion, gellan gum, natural carrot extractives (for color), natural flavors, natural turmeric extractives (for color), potassium citrate, salt, soy lecithin, sugar, tapioca syrup, tetrasodium pyrophosphate, transglutaminase, and nisin (a preservative).
All those ingredients create something that looks and feels like scrambled eggs. You might notice that I didn’t include “tastes” in the previous sentence. I’ll get to that later.
When it’s poured out of its bottle, it looks like an Egg Beaters product, but grainer. But the magic begins when the product starts to curdle in the pan. The liquid’s pastel yellow color turns into a vibrant yellow, it looks like scrambled eggs, and it has a soft scrambled eggs-like texture.
While Just Egg can fool my eyes, it cannot fool my taste buds. The instant they got to experience the plant-based egg product, they knew something was up. Its flavor is like vegetables, although seasoned vegetables. But I think the way it looks and feels has my brain thinking it’s an omelet with A LOT of vegetables.
I’m fine with the way it tastes. So much so that if chickens went extinct for some reason, like bird flu or way too many foxes protecting all the chicken coops, I’d be okay with eating Just Egg for the rest of my life.