“Gelatin”

What is gelatin?

This is a question that’s mostly asked by people when they first known of gelatin.

Gelatin is a protein that solidify our liquid, we use that in making jelly, mousse, confit or even western dish sauce. It is a substance that took a big part in pastry.

What is gelatin made of?

Gelatin is made of bones. Yes, it’s made of bones, the method in making gelatin is very simple, boil the pig bones, skin with water and reduce the whole pot of mixture, the residue fluid is the gelatin, sound easy but when you’re making that, you’ll figure out that you need lots of bones and skin to make only a small volume of gelatin, that’s why we’ll not make that by our own hands. We buy gelatin sheets and gelatin powder in stores.

Gelatin sheets or gelatin powder?

What’s the difference between gelatin sheets and gelatin powder? Most of the people will ask this question so what’s the difference? the ingredients are the same but the application method is totally difference. If you’re using gelatin sheets, you’ll have to just soak the gelatin sheets into the cold water and soak them until they become soft.

On the other hand, when we’re using gelatin powder, we measure the powder and mix that will cold water, mix well with a whisk and wait for the powder to absorb the moisture and become moist.

Both of the gelatin powder and gelatin sheets make good quality of jelly or mousse but i seldom use gelatin because of the following reasons.

Firstly, gelatin sheets need to soak in the water but the water volume do not have a standard in recipe, chefs will ask you to just soak them in water and use it, no measurement affect the quality of the products, for the gelatin powder, we measure exactly the correct ratio of water to blend with the gelatin powder,having a much more precise result.

Secondly, if you’re a careless person, i really don’t recommend you to use gelatin sheets because they are sensitive with heat, if you forgot to use cold water to soak the them, they will melt and all you have is a watery gelatin. On the other hand, if we accidentally use the warm water or room temperature water to mix the gelatin powder, we still measure the exact volume of water and gelatin although the mixture will become a little watery.

So, which one are you gonna choose, gelatin sheets or gelatin powder? We prefer gelatin powder.

Water

As we mentioned before, we use cold water to soak our gelatin sheets and gelatin powder but why?

First of all, we figure out that there are freezing point and melting point in science, freezing point means that the temperature that’ll freeze the substance and the melting point of cos mean that the temperature to melt. The melting point of gelatin is about 35 degree c, we should also mention that it’s quite hot in Hong Kong, most of the time, the temperature of the room temperature water is around 30 degree C, the 30 degree C.

Although we mention that gelatin melt at about 35 degree C, if we soak it into water, the gelatin absorb the water and soften, we have to squeeze the excess water out of gelatin sheets. Here comes the important part, when we’re holding the gelatin, our hands have body temperature, that will melt the gelatin and your hands will be sticky.

As a result, we use cold water to prevent the melting of gelatin, as the cold water can help us to cool down the temperature of the gelatin so we will not get a mess.

Thanks for stepping in to read this post, if you want to learn how to make our mango mousse, click