aquafaba

The story of aquafaba begins not in a laboratory but in a kitchen in France in 2015. Joël Roessel, a French tenor and food blogger, noticed that the liquid drained from a can of chickpeas could whip into stiff peaks like egg whites. He coined the word by joining Latin aqua (water) and faba (bean), and published his discovery online that year. The name was functional: it described the thing precisely and sounded credible.

A few months later, Goose Wohlt, a software engineer in Indiana, independently discovered that aquafaba could replace eggs in meringues, and he posted his results to Facebook in March 2015. The vegan baking community adopted the word almost overnight, and within weeks it appeared in food blogs across Europe and North America. Wohlt's experiment demonstrated that the proteins and starches leached from chickpeas during cooking behaved like albumin. The word spread because the discovery spread.

Both aqua and faba had been in scientific Latin since antiquity. Faba referred to the broad bean in Classical Latin: Pliny the Elder used it in the first century A.D., and Virgil planted faba beans in the Georgics. Aqua is older still, tracing to Proto-Indo-European akwa- (water). Roessel borrowed this classical vocabulary to give his domestic discovery a formal register.

Aquafaba entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2020, a timeline of five years from coinage to lexicographic recognition. Few words travel that road so quickly. The food science community confirmed what bakers already knew: the soluble proteins in legume cooking liquid, primarily legumin and vicilin, create a foam stable enough for mousse, pavlova, and macarons. The word outlasted the trend because the technique proved genuinely useful.