Actual thought I had in the shower!
Gelatin was originally and still often is derived from meat by-products, so wouldn’t it make more sense as a meat dish?
I looked it up, and it turns out that accounts of aspic (a savory gelatin dish) predate the earliest record of gelatin desserts by more than half a millennium!
Maybe the mid-20th-century meat Jell-O trend makes more sense than I thought
More sense? I don’t agree with you. Gelatin is a blank slate. Has pretty much zero flavor and can take on the taste of pretty much whatever you put into it. It gels up. That’s pretty much it, it’s up to you to decide what you want to do with it.
That said, it’s very versatile cooking ingredient. Is great in soups and stocks. Making gummies. Making gels, custards, pudding. It’s great as a binder. Not a great emulsifier, but you can do it with enough blending, however it breaks at higher temperatures.
It’s flavorless once you’ve extracted it, but how easy is it to get it pure enough that it doesn’t retain meaty flavors? (I genuinely don’t know, I’ve never done it myself)
I use it to make edible gummies. You can’t taste the gelatin at all. It’s a cup of fruit juice, a cup of infused oil, 10 drops of flavoring oil, 5 packs of gelatin powder, and a small pack of flavored gelatin.
It’s just tastes fruity and wonderful. I don’t get any meaty taste, and I’m using arguably more gelatin than most people would.
Savory gelatin tho… I’m so glad I was born too late to enjoy a 1970s midwestern potluck dinner party.
Wait until you learn what head cheese is.
Terrine in general is fantastic as charcuterie. I’d be totally fine with head cheese. I get that the process is gross, but it tastes great. Kind of like pate.
The whole process of farm to table is gross if you think about it.
The whole process of farm to table is gross if you think about it.
It is. But when you kill the animal, you can at least eat all of it.
head cheese
But that name is extremely disgusting.
It got the name by having the entire head of a pig in it.
The head part is not my issue. The combination grosses me out.
Yeah. Terrine is a better generalized word for it.
Delicious
Gelatin used to take days to make before it was mass produced. It was a dish reserved for the rich, and it would make sense that a fine chef would use such a rare ingredient in a main course.
I make chicken jello (from chicken skin and bones) for my cat all the time, it only takes an hour.
Ever get a costco rotisserie chicken? The juice at the bottom has a ton of gelatin in it and it sets quickly. Rotisserie chicken flavored jello
The rotisserie jello definitely isn’t a guilty pleasure of mine…
Half way to gravy. Yum!
In Italy, I would arguably state that most users of gelatin are in savory dishes, mostly similar to the aspic main picture. Only exception I know is panna cotta that needs gelatin to set. Sweet Jell-O for me is a US symbol.
That’s cool to know!
I mean, cream comes from a cow tit but it’s still pretty useful in dessert. Eggs come from a chicken butt but are vital for most desserts as well. And if you look up pictures of aspic, well, there’s a good reason you don’t see it often anymore.
Sweet/savory mix: embrace it
They should issue that as a challenge on a cooking contest show, it seems like something that would require a lot of skill and adaptability to nail first try
That being said, I will not be embracing any gelatin, it would squish and make a mess
You are right, however aspic tastes terrible and is used more for presentation in traditional Garde manger
I think it was more of a marketing switch to make it sweet cause well its easy to add suger to stuff and then it tastes good. Sugar and salt can mask the flavors of ultraprocessed foods, especially the kind that that leach out of the metal in a factory production line.
There are plenty of foods that hat are sweet buy have animal source origins. Take for example the Oreo cookie filling which at first was equal parts pork lard and sugar. Also, anything with dairy and eggs so cake and ice cream also fit into this.
