The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #33: Sour Cream Dessert

Howdy, Jigglers! This week in Jell-O-Land, I wanted to make a smooth dessert recipe to try out a new mold I found in a classic pattern, and I landed on Sour Cream Dessert. While the inclusion of sour cream in a dessert might sound a little odd initially, it isn't unheard of. I think some cheesecakes use sour cream, and I know I've had sour cream fruit pies (which were delicious, as I recall).

Now this is a simple little gelatin number to make. I used unflavored gelatin instead of Jell-O and canned mango nectar instead of the water for a creamy tropical mold. Note: you can't get "light cream" in my neck of the woods, so I used heavy whipping cream (it's not a low-calorie dish, I can tell you that much). Maybe you would want to use half and half instead of heavy cream, but what I did certainly worked.

The mood lighting in this photo highlights just how beige this dessert turned out. It perfectly illustrates the nice new mold shape, though! The beigeness is due to a combination of the mango nectar and the artificial vanilla I used. The color, of course, will change depending on what you include as a fruit flavoring.

 

This is one creamy Jell-O dessert, which shouldn't be surprising considering that it's mostly dairy. All that creaminess and fat did drown out the mango flavor, though, and overall you only taste sweet dairy. Instead of slicing up a mango on top of the gelatin, which would also be great, I decided to make a mango nectar reduction sauce, since I had some of the nectar left over. I simmered a can of mango nectar with a quarter cup of sugar until it was well reduced. This sauce, when heated and poured over this gelatin, is AMAZING. It gels perfectly with the tangy hint of sour cream while being sweet and mangoey enough to taste like a slice of tropical heaven. The hot-cold contrast is also nice. It's a lot like serving flan with caramel sauce--you might not want to eat flan on its own, but with the sauce it's divine.

After filling my new mold, I had some gelatin mix left over, so I put it in an individual mold as well. Also pretty! I love how well it takes on the molds' shapes.

While slighly unconventional, Sour Cream Dessert is endlessly versatile. I can see where it would be delicious with some cherry juice in the mix and then topped with a cherry sauce, and it would be perfect with blueberries or blackberries too. Or gooseberries, anyone? Larger stone fruits like peaches and plums would even work. I might have to try this one again sometime with a different fruit combination and see what happens. Watch this space!

Anyway, thanks General Foods, for a somewhat bland recipe that you can whip up in a flash and use with nearly anything.

The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #119: Vegetable Trio

Howdy, Jigglers! It had to happen sooner or later--sooner or later I had to make Vegetable Trio, a layered Jell-O mold flavored with salad Jell-O and full of raw vegetables. Oh joy.

In all reality, I don't even mind the idea overly much. I like carrots, cabbage, and spinach, and the layered look is aesthetically pleasing. Even so, I knew that encasing all of that in savory gelatin was just going to be weird. I certainly wasn't disappointed.

Since, as you may or may not be aware, Jell-O Salad Gelatin has not been available in around 50 years, I added a hefty sprinkle of celery salt and some unflavored gelatin in place the savory Jell-O mix and salt. In order to make a more flavorful salad, I substituted homemade chicken broth for both the boiling and cold water in the recipe. In addition, chives are not available where I live, so I used finely sliced green onion instead. For the rest, I followed the recipe exactly.

One mistake I made was to divide the gelatin into three evenly divided blobs before mixing in the vegetables. Since loaf pans are wider at the top than at the bottom, you need more gelatin for the spinach layer than for the cabbage layer, and more for the cabbage layer than for the carrot layer. This meant that though the carrot layer was thoroughly enclosed in gelatin, the spinach layer was not. The recipe, I believe, assumes that you will intuitively figure that out, and maybe a cleverer cook would, but I did not. Other than that, this is an easy recipe to follow.

 

Of course, since this recipe has a photographed featured in JOJ, I had the added pressure of trying to make the recipe look like the picture, as my husband is very adamant that I need to make at least one gelatin dish that looks like what the book shows. He was not satisfied with the bits of spinach and cabbage sticking out of the gelatin matrix. For my money, I think it's pretty close.

I sliced the cabbage very finely, because no one wants to eat large chunks of raw cabbage, but I wish I would have taken the time to truly mince it because the long slices made it messy to cut this bad boy. Honestly, though, this loaf of gelatinous veggie mass won't cut cleanly no matter what you do.

The taste is, well, very salad-y. I'm glad I went with chicken broth instead of water, as it makes everything more umami-y. The celery flavor doesn't stand out all that much, which is fine. The green onion is extremely strong, though, so I would halve the quantity of it in any future attempts (which aren't likely, even though this isn't a disaster). The overall effect is fine, but rather plain.

Getting back to that mistake I made, though: the spinach and green onion, as they weren't completely coated in gelatin, started to deteriorate after about three days, after which point I started removing them entirely. The cabbage and carrot layers, though, held up fine for almost a week. Of course, if you serve this at a party (like a weirdo) all at once, it doesn't matter much, but otherwise I strongly suggest either divvying up your gelatin unevenly, as I described above, or just increasing the amount of broth or water you use and increasing the amount of gelatin and flavoring proportionately. That way you have plenty of gelatin to get that spinach all buried in there where it will stay nicely preserved for much longer if necessary, and look much neater in any case.

Here's how I first served the Vegetable Trio: as a side salad to a soup-salad-sandwich lunch. The sandwich was a grilled cheese on homemade peasant bread, and the soup is regular tomato soup. Now, raw vegetables in cold, clammy, savory gelatin isn't quite as enticing as hot, salty soup or a cheesy fried sandwich, but it certainly added virtue. That's one thing I've got to hand to this recipe--it is exquisitely healthy. If you want to pack all kinds of veggie goodness into one loaf pan, this is the way to do it. I also do really appreciate the geometry of the loaf pan-shaped, rectangularly layered salad to the side of soup in a round bowl.

And, of course, for all I'm complaining about it, Vegetable Trio is surprisingly edible. I ate it all (minus the spinach once it got some age on it). I can't even recommend against making it. If this is what you want, the recipe does what it says on the tin, so to speak. So congrats, General Foods, you exceeded my expectations by making a dish I truly feel neutral about.

"Gelatin" in the Wild: Jin Jin Passion Fruit Flavor Jelly

Howdy, Jigglers! I went to my local Asian grocery store recently, so you know what that means: a foodstuff similar to gelatin was to be had!

Now, I was not able to glean from the bag what the coagulating substance in Passion Fruit Flavor Jelly actually was, but I don't believe it was gelatin, as it was being kept at room temperature and the jelly was not liquified.

What I did clearly notice was a plethora of health and safety indications on the packaging, for example:

I was glad to see that this product is fully HACCP compliant. However, I was not so enthused by the following ominous warning:

Guess I've never seen a choking warning directed at the elderly before, but I suppose it makes sense. The prominence of the warning language is certainly offputting, though.

However, the jelly itself was firm, flavorful, and amazingly not weird at all. I quite like it, though I'm sure there are tons of preservatives in it that they should be warning you about. Maybe those warnings are in that other language that I can't read.

I'm usually not big on passionfruit-flavored items, but this has a bright, sweet flavor, almost citrusy but not quite, with a bold firm-set gelatin texture to go with it. I have thus far eaten these with a spoon and by squeezing it out of the cup (taking care to bite off a section and not swallow it whole, of course). And, to be fair, after having eaten it, I can understand both the temptation and the danger of swallowing it whole. These things are definitely big enough to clog up your throat. Regardless, I must say that Passion Fruit Flavor Jelly is the best jelly item I've picked up at the Asian grocer to date. Well done, Asia.