ABJECT FAILURE. It's never really pretty, is it?

I'm waiting for my third pan of vegetarian marshmallows to firm up. The other two pans have oozed down the drain already, having never progressed beyond the goo stage. The deadline for this column is staring me in the face, and I'm pretty sure the third pan isn't going to come out any better than the first two.

Now, I trust you know why regular marshmallows aren't vegetarian. It's because of a little ingredient called gelatin. Gelatin, or "glutinous material obtained from animal tissues by boiling," according to the dictionary, certainly isn't vegetarian. Unfortunately, it's quite prevalent in packaged foods, especially confections.

(I had one vegetarian friend who had a rude shock while idly reading the label on a jar of roasted peanuts he was consuming. The fine print listed gelatin as an ingredient. It inspired him to write one of the rudest, most brilliant complaint letters I've ever had the privilege of reading.

"Imagine my surprise," the letter began, "when I looked on the ingredient list of your product only to find that I was eating peanuts with DEAD COWS in them. Since I am a vegetarian, I don't usually eat DEAD COWS, and I wasn't really expecting to find them ground up in my peanuts, since peanuts are generally a vegetarian food. In the future, perhaps you could warn other vegetarians about the presence of DEAD COWS in your peanuts by printing a picture of a DEAD COW on the label.")

I tried many times over the years to confect some veggie marshmallows. Making marshmallows is relatively simple. You combine sugar and corn syrup, boil it until it reaches the desired stage, add a gelling agent, and beat the hell out of it.

The gelling agent in most vegetarian recipes is a type of seaweed used a lot in Asian cooking called agar, or agar-agar. I have used kosher gelatin, pure agar, agar mixtures. But the marshmallows never gelled. I have found recipes on the Internet and in respected vegetarian publications. I have adapted recipes from Joy of Cooking and other mainstream cookbooks. Still, no dice.

According to the wonderful reference book On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee, agar has to be handled differently than gelatin – and it doesn't really remelt after it sets unless it reaches more than 180 degrees. You can put chunks of set-up agar in a pretty hot dish, and it will maintain its shape, making it a valued textural ingredient in savory Asian soups and other items.

Apparently, not everyone has the same marshmallow failure rate as I do. About a year ago a new product appeared on the shelves at Rainbow Grocery: Vegan Supreme Marshmallows contain no animal products and they look and feel just like marshmallows. But at $5 for a 10-ounce package, I have in the past been reluctant (i.e., too cheap) to buy them. I just redoubled my homemade efforts.

This week, however, I decided to make the investment.

A bit chewier than animal-product marshmallows, Vegan Supremes have that intoxicating vanilla aroma and powdery feel that takes you back to childhood. I put them on a fork and toasted them over a burner on my stove (it's been a little too inclement for campfires lately), and they performed very well, getting all toasty and golden brown on the outside and melty inside.

Vegan Supremes were dreamed up by Ming Tran, who lives in southern California. I called up the company to try and sneakily get information about why my marshmallows were repeatedly failing. I wimped out on the technical questions, afraid she would think I was starting my own competing marshmallow company. But I did find out she started the company because, as she told me, "I had a son who is vegan, and one day he told me he had never eaten a s'more. I tried to buy vegan marshmallows for him, but they were no longer in production. I made some, and they came out OK. And then I messed with the recipe, and they came out really good. I started selling them on eBay, and the business took off from there."

Tran, who was in the finance industry before staring Vegan Supreme, uses a couple of gelling agents for her marshmallows – carageenan and locust bean gum – so I guess I shouldn't take it personally that my pan of 'mallows is, 24 hours later, still just a pan of slightly thickened sugar syrup.

I was planning to end this column with a recipe, but instead, I'll end it with a plea: if there are any food scientists – pro or amateur – out there who can explain where I went wrong, please drop me an e-mail.

Go to Miriam Wolf's Meatless archives.

E-mail Miriam Wolf at miriam@coolcopy.com.