Sundays are also for failed food experiments

I don't like just tossing out foods that are just fine because you have used only one element out of it. When it is some kind of vegetable material I can always use this in the circular system of worms, chickens and making vegetable stock. But with eggs when using only the yolk for a recipe (we were trying to make pudding or custard, whatever you call it) which means that the egg whites were left over.

And I didn't want to toss them since were just pefectly fine. So I thought to be smart and go for it and use some digital advice what to do with it.

So I asked Grok (you know the AI engine in Twitter) what I was able to do with all of these egg whites.

Grok came up with some suggestions as eggwhite omelet, coconut macaroon, almond cookies, but they all needed some additional ingredients. The one that appealed to me most was making Meringues. I remember doing that back in the days a bit more and I was willing to give it a try again.

Making meringues

Making and baking is not the most favorite for me to do. I like to freewheel while cooking and pay medium attention to recipes and with baking..you can't do this. As I was about to find out again.. sigh....

As the recipe said this was only a matter of putting together eggwhites, white sugar (and a hint of vanilla sugar just because this is nice) and a bit of salt. But it all starts with reading the recipe proper..

What I did was grind the sugar up for a bit and add it to the egg whites together with a pinch of salt. Then I started stirring.

And I stirred and I stirred. Some people have a fancy kitchen aid machine for this, but I was doing this by hand. And I stirred and I stirred, because I know this takes a couple of minutes before the eggwhite starts to turn fluffy.

But they never turned fluffy.....

This is how it started after whisking more than half an hour, and that is when I new this wasn't going into the right direction. So again I asked AI why my mixture was not turning fluffy and this was because I had added all of the ingredients at once.

Crap... I didn't read proper and tossed everything together before whisking and this was wrong. Instead I should have started whisking the eggwhites with nothing and later on should have added the sugar and salt.

Should have, would have, could have. But this was not the deal. So this was still a liquid and I thought...what the heck...let me just try to make something just out of it.

After baking

I read in different recipes that either you can toss this in the oven for an hour on 100 degrees or for 4 hours at 60 degrees celsius. So I went for the one hour tactic as this was already broken.

And you know how fluffy meringues should look like? Well, this meringue pancake looked like nothing of that all.

But who cares, as long as the taste is fine...who cares about the appearance of my new born creation.

I waited a decent amount of time before removing the meringue from the baking paper. And that is ofcourse when it all when into one thousand crumbling pieces which were almost not even worth it to start to try to eat anymore.

But who care...the taste was awesome!!

Not every experiment is a winner, especially when trying to make something new. This was a nice reminder of that. Or better said...it was a good reason to read recipes a lot better than I did.