4d ago

Given gelatin's source, it makes more sense as a savory dish than a dessert

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

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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.
  
  Delicious
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 don't think you can get pure gelatin from animal sources without losing the meat flavour. Gelatin from animal sources is made by a process involving hydrolyzation, which breaks down the muscle proteins into pepides. The proteins in meat are the main reason for its identifiable flavour. The broken down peptides in gelatin don't taste like anything. If the gelatin still tasted like meat it would indicate that the gelatin extraction process was incomplete.
  Even if it was possible to do some kind of half-assed gelatin extraction process that preserved some of the animal flavour, there's no market for that. People who buy gelatin expect it to be flavourless, so they can use it in their recipes without the gelatin affecting the taste. Gelatin is used to provide a thick and, well, gelatinous texture. If someone's making a recipe involving gelatin that's supposed to taste meaty, they're gonna use their own animal products (i.e. meat and/or meat-based stock).
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.
  
  That's not pure gelatin though. It's a mix of gelatin from the breakdown of proteins, and juices from the chicken. Great for your cat without a doubt, and absolutely worth putting in home made soups or stews, but not something you'd want to use to make a wobbly dessert! Getting pure gelatin (i.e. all broken down peptides and virtually no remaining muscle protein) takes either days of careful boiling and straining, or a controlled industrial-chemical process. Gelatin was a fancy-chef ingredient when it took days in the kitchen to produce it with relative purity, but now you can buy Jell-O powder with pocket change because we make gelatin at scale using an industrial process.
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
- Half way to gravy. Yum!
- The rotisserie jello definitely isn't a guilty pleasure of mine...
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.
I find Jello pretty revolting as is, thank you for the nightmare fuel!
- My wife hates jello too! I think I've only had it once or twice in the 5 years since we got married XD
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
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.
- Ahh, I was talking about extracting it yourself from hide and bones, the store-bought stuff is definitely refined enough that taste wouldn't be an issue
  
  Omg. Yeah. I would never attempt to extract it myself. It's just bone broth at that point for me.
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 but 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.

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