Hey, this is no yolk!

WHICH CAME first, eggless baking or the egg?

Easy, right? After all, eggs have been part of cooking and baking traditions since antiquity, and with good reason, from a chef's perspective. Among the ingredients, they're handy multitaskers, contributing texture, structure and/or taste, depending on use.

So, the recent bad news about eggs hit a lot of people right in the gut.

It wasn't just the half-billion eggs that were recalled (another brand was named this past weekend) after 2,000 people were sickened. It was also the federal Food and Drug Administration's report on filthy conditions in these egg farms - the unsettling scenes of contamination and close-packed misery that help make salmonella as common as it is (an estimated 2 million eggs a year carry salmonella, and the federal Centers for Disease Control says that 100,000 Americans are sickened every year by salmonella in eggs).

As a result, while Congress gears up for hearings on the issue next Monday, a lot of us are now paying attention to the presence of eggs in foods and wondering about the alternatives.

It almost seems like a brave new frontier, finding new ways to achieve what eggs do without actually using them. But eggless cooking and even baking have been around for quite a while, and there are expert chefs who have worked out delicious ways around the egg.

A dish of scrambled eggs is a breakfast dish easy enough for even the klutziest cook to pull off. And eggs like this, in their natural element with little adornment, seem like they'd be hard to replace. But in fact, scrambled tofu has a long and storied history among non-egg-eaters.

Extra-firm tofu has a density and jiggly texture surprisingly similar to scrambled eggs, so it's easy enough to chop it into rough cubes (or tear it for rougher) approximately the size of egg pieces in scrambled eggs and fry it up in oil (replicating eggs' oiliness) along with seasonings like onion, garlic, paprika and turmeric.

The turmeric adds some pleasant flavor but also turns the whole dish yellow to mimic the appearance of scrambled eggs. Diced green pepper is a favorite addition.

But it's in baked goods that eggs are often considered most indispensable. Without eggs, how can you make fluffy cakes? Cookies that stick together? Rich, fudgy brownies? What about quiche? What about meringue, for goodness' sake?

For these, we went to the experts.