Got a hankering for a wobbly, jiggly dessert but also a moral objection to boiled animal collagen? Well, tough luck, because according to the experts, there's no plant-based magic bullet that can replicate the exact texture of gelatine. Richard Phillips, head pastry chef at Timberyard in Edinburgh, delivers the grim news: “The truth is, there’s no exact substitute for gelatine, because it has an incredibly unique texture.”

But wait, there's a whole arsenal of plant-based gelling agents out there! Agar-agar, gellan gum, pectin, carrageenan, locust bean gum, vege-gel - the list goes on. Yet Phillips cautions that the results will never quite match up. The temperature requirements differ, and, as Philip Khoury, author of *Beyond Baking*, points out, the usual workaround is to simply design recipes that don't require gelling agents in the first place.

For the home cook staring at a recipe demanding gelatine sheets, Khoury suggests a pragmatic approach: manipulate other ingredients to achieve the desired texture. For a thick, pipeable cream, he turns to cornflour. And to illustrate, he points to the panna cotta and crème brûlée recipes in his first book, *A New Way to Bake*. “You get two very different textures from essentially the same recipe,” he explains. “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.”

So there you have it: if you want a vegan-friendly dessert that sets, you might have to get creative, or simply accept that your panna cotta will be more like a pudding. Or, you know, just choose a recipe that doesn't need gelatine in the first place. But where's the fun in that?