You can bake that s%&#: Leftover egg whites

A two-part series on eggy dessert opportunities

Baking buds, hello! We’re back with the latest edition of you can bake that s%&#, a column whose intellectual underpinnings are that dessert is the ultimate food waste solution (fight me!). 

Have leftover egg whites, will flourless-chocolate-walnut cookie.

Food waste accounts for eight percent of global carbon emissions; and in the U.S., we waste more food at home than anywhere else. Just by storing food better and imagining ways to dessertily snarf everything rather than toss it, our kitchens can be a place of climate action. 

This week and next, we’re talking egg whites and yolks, because among leftover ingredients, they’re my biggest food waste risk. I make a key lime pie, and suddenly, I’m afloat in egg whites. I make macarons, and I find myself pouring three more yolks into the never-to-be-thawed Frozen Deli Container of Yolk Doom. 

But they’re also a yuge baking opportunity. A spare egg white added to granola before baking yields crunchier clusters. Yolks become chocolate pudding in 30 minutes flat, or crème brulée in an hour plus chilling time. 

Yolks and whites can be tricky leftovers, to state the obvious, because their shelf life once cracked is short. But proper storage tips — and dessert ideas — can help. Let’s start with egg whites.

Storage: The freezer is your friend

Egg whites can hang out in your fridge tightly covered for up to four days, says the USDA. But I can’t be trusted to count the days, so I freeze whites straightaway. They hibernate happily in the freezer for up to a year and — I’ve learned the hard way — thaw happily if no more than a few are frozen together. 

People have different methods for manageable egg-white freezing. Some freeze one egg white in each depression of an ice-cube mold before transferring them to a freezer-safe bag for longer-term storage. I’m lazy and dump up to a few egg whites (no more, Caroline!) into a small tupperware, knowing that I’ll weigh them after thawing to be sure I’m adding the right amount to a recipe. One large egg white weighs about 33g. 

Egg whites are best thawed overnight in the fridge and, if you need them to whip, brought up closer to room temperature by letting them sit on the counter for a half hour.

Egg-white treats, sorted by time

Meringue may be “the go-to” treat to make with spare egg whites, says Dressler Parsons, friend of this newsletter and baker at Radio Bakery in Greenpoint, but there’s so much more they can do. Dressler — who also hosts the Regenerative Baking podcast — contends “the most delicious option” may be to make Swiss or Italian meringue buttercream, “since you can flavor the buttercream with what you want, and it’ll stay good in your fridge for a while.” Kaitlin Navarro, my buddy from Le Cordon Bleu Paris and a baker at the Bay Area darling Butter and Crumble, sees egg whites as an opportunity to whip up a quick batch of flourless chocolate walnut cookies, which I made yesterday. 

I pooled Kaitlin’s, Dressler’s, and my standby treat plans for egg whites and sorted them by time, so that no matter how busy you are, there’s always a dessert idea within reach.

Quick (<30 minutes total)

• Dressler’s pick: Make sugared herbs, like sage or mint leaves (1 white)

• Kaitlin’s pick: Make a gin fizz (1 white)

• Kaitlin’s pick: Make flourless chocolate walnut cookies (4 whites)

Middling (<2 hours total)

• My pick: Make crunchy-clusters granola (1 white) 

• Dressler’s pick: Make financiers (4 whites)

• Dressler’s pick: Make Italian or Swiss meringue buttercream (4-5 whites)

Longer (>2 hours, including chilling time)

• Dressler’s pick: Make a showstopper pavlova (4 whites), perhaps topped with the very citrus curd that used up your yolks!

• My pick: Make frozen chocolate chip meringata (6 whites)

When I had two spare egg whites yesterday, I made a half-batch of Kaitlin’s go-to flourless chocolate cookie, subbing pistachios and pecans for the typical walnuts since I needed to use ‘em up.

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An extra helping

• Leave a comment: What’s your go-to way to turn spare egg whites into dessert? Leave a comment and I’ll add it to the list!

• Read:

  Rose Wilde
  wrote a love letter to eggs in
  Kitchen Projects
  , complete with swoopy buttercream prose and practical tips for composting eggshells.

• Bake: Chloe Rose Crabtree meditated on baking science and egg whites in

  Vittles
  and, for the newsletter’s paid subscribers, shared a recipe for egg-white snickerdoodles.