What’s the best vegetarian alternative to gelatine?

. UK edition

Helen Goh's strawberry jelly panna cotta. This uses gelatine.

There is no exact plant-based substitute – the ideal option will depend on the dish. But, ultimately, it’s easiest to choose a recipe that doesn’t require gelatine

How do I go about substituting gelatine sheets for a vegetarian setting agent?
Sarah, Aberdeen
“The truth is, there’s no exact substitute for gelatine, because it has an incredibly unique texture,” says Richard Phillips, head of pastry at Timberyard in Edinburgh. Sure, there are plenty of plant-based gelling agents out there – “agar-agar [or just agar], gellan gum, pectin, carrageenan, locust bean gum, vege-gel… the list goes on,” says Phillips – but the result will never quite be the same.

“The temperature you have to use them at is different [to gelatine],” says Philip Khoury, author of Beyond Baking, so his usual workaround is to simply formulate recipes that don’t use gelling agents. Now, that’s all well and good when you’re a pastry chef, but what about the rest of us? “If, for example, I’m making a thick, pipeable cream, then I’ll use cornflour,” says Khoury, and just manipulate it to get different textures. Let’s take the panna cotta and creme brulee recipes in his first book, A New Way to Bake, as an example: “You get two very different textures from essentially the same recipe. The only difference being that if you pour the custard into a tray and chill it, it will set, whereas if you beat it with a whisk, it will turn into this luscious, creamy texture that’s just set.”

But one gelatine substitute doesn’t fit all. “There are specific alternatives for specific things,” says Phillips: “Reversible pectin for glazes; kuzu [root starch] to thicken sauces; pectin to make jellies, using different dosages for different sets.” Khoury, meanwhile, prefers agar for the latter, and the seaweed-derived gelling agent has become something of a poster child here. But again, don’t expect exactly the same result as you’d get with gelatine. And that’s not a subjective statement, as Harold McGee explains in his bible On Food and Cooking: “Agar forms gels at even lower concentrations than gelatine does, less than 1% by weight. An agar jelly is somewhat opaque and has a more crumbly texture than a gelatine jelly.” Where gelatine sets and remelts at around the same temperature, an agar gel “only melts again when its temperature reaches 85C [185F]”, which is to say, a jelly made with agar won’t have that joyous melt-in-the-mouth texture.

Even so, Reece Kallah, head pastry chef at Mount St Restaurant in London, uses agar in fruit puree gels, which feature in her set vanilla custard. “As a general guide, use 0.5% agar by weight of your liquid – for example, 5g agar per 1 litre of liquid.” Kallah mixes the agar with a little sugar “to help it disperse evenly, as it doesn’t dissolve particularly well on its own”, before whisking it into the boiling liquid, pouring into a tray or ramekin, and leaving to set. “I still prefer gelatine, though – it has a softer, more delicate texture because of that lower melting point.”

Stars don’t always live up to their hype, after all, and Khoury adds another word of caution. “If Sarah goes about this by saying: ‘I want to swap gelatine for something else’, then it won’t work; if she wants success, then follow a recipe that doesn’t contain gelatine.” It’ll likely be less faff, too.