The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #160: Quick Tomato Mold

I'm trying to give all the kooky Jell-O recipes in this odyssey a fair shake, but sometimes it just doesn't shake out. The Quick Tomato Mold is another recipe I made while on a camera and writing hiatus due to being too busy, but I remember it clear as day.

 

Since Salad Jell-O flavors no longer exist, I used unflavored gelatin as the base for this "salad" and added some Italian herbs to the mix to mimic the Italian salad flavor (in this case parsley, oregano, and a little thyme), but otherwise made it as written. I was sort of excited to make this recipe since I knew that tomato aspics were popular dishes for a while both in the American South and in England, plus I had never really had tomato juice and wanted to use the leftover juice to try a Bloody Mary.

Unfortunately, none of that turned out how I wanted it to. Instead of letting the gelatin set up in a can, which just seems like a cheap-looking way to do it, I divided it up into silicone baking cups, and it had a nice red color and set up very firmly. However, it had the unmistakeable taste of pizza sauce. It really just tasted like hard pizza sauce, perhaps pizza sauce that had been left open in the refrigerator for far too long. The gelatin was so strongly flavored that I started gagging upon eating it and ended up throwing the vast majority of it out after struggling through one cup.

Now, to be fair, maybe this dish would turn out a little differently with some celery juice and celery salt or vegetable stock (to represent the other salad Jell-O flavors) instead of Italian herbs, but I somehow doubt it. It primarily tastes of the tomato juice, and I think tomato juice just isn't for me, especially not in a solid form. But I couldn't finish the Bloody Mary, either. I think you just have to really enjoy the flavor of tomato juice to be able to stomach eating it like solid food.

Another caveat to my dislike of this recipe is that I used a new kind of unflavored gelatin for it, and I believe its lower quality caused the recipe to turn out grittier than it should have. However, I don't think that's what ruined the experience for me.

Regardless, I would overall rate this recipe as very bad for being completely unappealing in every regard except the color, which is firetruck red as advertised.