Meatball Adventures

The tasty meatballs in mushroom cream sauce...without the gelatin.

I've been cooking through The Food Lab cookbook lately, and for the most part everything has been really tasty and straight forward.

Then came 'Pork Meatballs with Mushroom Cream Sauce'.

It seemed straight forward, but when I actually started to make it, I realized part of it seemed kinda funny. It called for 1/4 cup Buttermilk, and then to bloom a full packet of gelatin in it for 10 mins. After the ten mins, it called for fully saturating 2 slices of white bread in the mix.

That so did not happen.

The amount of liquid is just too little to fully saturate 2 pcs of bread after turning into a hunk of gelatin. It made no sense. I still tried it.

a solid hunk of buttermilk gelatin :( No liquid whatsoever to saturate anything.

Needless to say it was a disaster.

Kitsune tweeted Kenji (the author) about it, and asked what we were doing wrong. He replied saying that we needed to stir the gelatin into the buttermilk instead of sprinkling like the directions say. This still seems really strange. I would think that even stirred in, that amount of buttermilk is just not enough to saturate the bread after turning into gelatin. Either way, I am buying more packets tomorrow and will try again.

So I went ahead with the recipe and soaked the bread and buttermilk, minus the gelatin. The meatballs turned out quite tasty, and if I get the gelatin thing to work, I suppose they will be mind blowing.