Photo: Amallia Eka (Shutterstock)
I had mixed feelings after perusing different pictures and recipes for cloud bread, a food that has become quite popular on TikTok. One of them was confusion. I came across two very different looking versions—one that looked like colorful cotton candy and another that resembled brown cobblestone-looking pancakes. Furthermore, the recipes for the more cloud-esque of the two seemed uncannily similar to meringue. I have good news and bad news about cloud bread. The bad news is that the cute one is trash worthy. It’s really very bad. However, there’s a bright side. The cobblestone is inspiringly edible, and there are ways to improve them both.
I’d like to get a few things out of the way before we overhaul these fluffy foods. Cloud bread is not bread. Both the sweet and savory versions are made nearly entirely from whipped eggs. Any secondary ingredients add little in the way of flavor and are there mostly to stabilize the whipped eggs. The appeal of having a “bread” made of eggs is that it’s low in carbohydrates, fats and calories. Cloud bread also provides a few nutrients most breads don’t provide (because it’s eggs), and it can serve as an alternative for those who manage dietary restrictions due to gluten sensitivity or diabetes. Cloud bread is fluffy, dry, and mildly flavored. When prepared well, savory cloud bread is sturdy, flexible, and can hold sandwich fillings, effectively working like true bread. Now let’s right some wrongs.
Sweet Cloud Bread
I imagine that this is the version of cloud bread that caught everyone’s attention on TikTok. It’s very squishy, tall, bouncy and naturally stark white. It can be easily dyed to create bold, colorful mounds of fluff. Biting into puffy cloud bread looks and feels like chomping on a cartoon cumulus cloud. Sadly, the awful taste will bring you right back down to Earth.
Sweet cloud bread is meringue. It’s not like meringue, it is meringue, rebranded. Both recipes call for whipped egg whites with sugar, and sometimes a stabilizer, like an acid or a starch. Depending on what else you add, how you prepare it, and how you finish this fluffy stuff, you can end up with anything from marshmallows to crunchy meringue cookies. My issue with this “bread” variety is that once it’s finished, the outer layer is extraordinarily sticky, making it impossible to handle, and the flavor is wretched because it’s an uncooked type of meringue that never dries out. That’s not to say it’s unsafe to eat. This simple meringue, sometimes called a French meringue, is common and edible. But the flavor of uncooked, sticky egg white is especially unpalatable when eaten alone. It’s a flavor that arrives as an aftertaste but stays in your nose for an hour. French meringue usually tops desserts with flavorsome components like a lemon curd, or chocolate mousse, so you don’t get overwhelmed by the egg white aroma. Cloud bread drowns you in it. Since all of the recipes I’ve found are very light on the sugar, and seeing as that’s the only other ingredient besides cornstarch, there are no other flavors to latch onto, and you’d need a lot more sugar to make it taste like something.
If you like meringue, I suggest sticking with the classics and adding some food coloring for a festive feel. Try meringue cookies, pavlovas, or any of the desserts listed here. For fluffy meringues that are stable and cloud-like, whip up a sumptuous batch of marshmallows. You can even forgo the typical square and mound up the marshmallows into cloud-shaped rounds. At the very least, use a cooked meringue to make your cloud bread. Swiss meringue and Italian meringue are both cooked while they’re being prepared, eliminating that nasty, raw egg white stench.
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Savory cloud breadPhoto: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann
Savory Cloud Bread
In the fictional history of cloud bread that I envision, this one is the OG. It’s not meringue masquerading as something else, and I can see this actually being a good alternative for someone who can’t, or chooses not to eat bread. Savory cloud bread involves very few ingredients. The eggs are separated and the whites are set aside. A few tablespoons of cream cheese are added to the egg yolks, along with salt. (Already infinitely better because we have flavor happening.) The egg whites are whipped to a stiff peak with any stabilizers the recipe indicates, and folded into the egg yolk mixture. The clouds are then scooped onto a parchment lined baking sheet and baked in a 300°F oven for about 20 minutes. These fluffy omelettes puff up, brown slightly, and deflate into a 2D version of cartoon clouds.
I used this recipe for cloud bread and they turned out nicely. At first I thought, why not just make an omelette, or egg white wraps? But these flats have some helpful bread-like qualities. They hold onto their fluffy texture for the most part; the aeration of the egg allows the top layer to dry out in the oven, so they’re not slippery like omelettes, and your fingers don’t feel wet when you hold them. Like most sandwich bread, they have a mild flavor, and remain sturdy, yet flexible, even when you pile sandwich fillings on top. The bubbly structure disperses any strong egg flavors and you can almost, sort of, kind of imagine that it’s bread.
To elevate your savory clouds even more, take advantage of the blank canvas. As long as you don’t add too much additional liquid, you can flavor these flats however you like. Add spices and herbs, like garlic powder, cayenne, dried basil, or thyme. Sneak in a dash of hot sauce, fish sauce, or worcestershire. Pile some sandwich fixin’s between two slices, and enjoy your clouds.
