• 0 Posts
  • 2 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • 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.


  • 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).