Way Out There Recipe #1: Molded Beet and Herb Salad

Howdy, Jigglers! So, I fully realize that between The Joys of Jell-O and the other three gelatin-specific cookbooks in my collection, I have enough Jell-O on my to-do list to keep me busy for a long time. However, sometimes you just stumple upon an opportunity you can't pass up, and so it was when I saw this beet-and-herb salad on Food52. 

Besides being very pretty (plus I really dig the mold they used), it appealed to me in the sense that I had some fermented beets along with beet brine in the fridge that needed to be finished up, and I have fresh herbs growing outside, so this seemed like a great way to get a lot of veggies and probiotics into my meals at no additional cost, and I can never argue with that.

The recipe is very simple to follow, though I did make two changes: I added my julienned fermented beets to the beet layer for extra beetiness, and I substituted worschester sauce for half of the balsamic vinegar. When I initially read this recipe, it reminded me flavorwise of a drinkable borscht I used to get from a Polish restaurant in the city where I used to live, which was a salty, beety, beefy broth, and I knew worschester could provide some of that umami-rich oomph to the flavor of this gelatin as well.

Apart from those minor changes, I used a food processor to chop the herbs instead of a blender because I still don't have a blender, but I recommend using a real blender if you can. I think it will extract the green color and various flavors from the herbs better. As it was, the herbed part of the salad tastes fine, but it stayed chunky and didn't turn green, so I added a drop of food coloring to get the effect. More on that later.

I was so taken by the appearance of this salad as one big mold that I wanted to find a way to make it work in my Bundt pan regardless of my previous struggles to get it to make molds attractive. So, inspired by the super-hard Jell-O I had recently at my local Chinese buffet, I added an extra tablespoon of gelatin to each layer of the salad to test if that would make it work better without imparting that classic musty gelatin taste, and I am proud to report that this part of the recipe test worked out phenomenally.

The salad indeed turned out firm and pretty, so I can confirm that you merely need extra gelatin to turn a Bundt pan into a decent mold. It looks much more purple in person than in the photos. Something important to note about the appearance of this dish if you plan on making it, though, is that the purple color of the beet layer will bleed into the herb layer after a couple of days in the refrigerator, so if you plan on making this for a party or some other such occasion, it's best to make it the same day or the day before for the aesthetic effect.

Tastewise, this dish is surprisingly good, though very salty due to my use of beet brine instead of beet juice. If you also wish to use beet brine, I recommend adding no salt to the herb layer for balance as well as eating the gelatin on some sort of unsalted cracker like a water cracker. My herbs mostly consisted of oregano and rosemary, but I also added thyme and green onions. I wanted to add parsley, but the day I went out to harvest the herbs I found that my parsley had been chomped back to nothing by the local wildlife. If you like dill, I imagine that this would be a perfect use for it.

All in all, this recipe is worth trying and does showcase the versatility of gelatin in an unexpected way, if you like beets, that is.