We overestimated how much we wanted strawberries.
| Strawberry Whip 2 tbsp gelatin, or 1 (¼-oz) envelope 1 tbsp water About 8 oz fresh strawberries A little lemon juice, if desired 1 tsp vanilla Red food coloring, if desired 1 cup cream ½ cup sugar Mix the gelatin and water in a small microwave-safe bowl. Set aside to soak about 5 minutes. Puree the strawberries, then pour through a strainer to remove the seeds and stringy bits. Microwave the gelatin until melted and watery, about 5 seconds or so. Add the gelatin, lemon juice, and vanilla to the strawberries. If desired, add a few drops of red food coloring. Whip the cream and sugar in a large bowl. Then fold in the strawberries. Transfer to the container of your choice, and place in the coldest part of your refrigerator. Chill and serve.
Adapted from a handwritten manuscript, 1930s-1940s
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Strawberries have been astonishingly cheap these past few weeks. I don't know if it's a bizarre confluence of economic coincidences, if we live near a lot of strawberry farms and didn't know it, or if it's some combination of the two. Furthermore, the berries are actually in season (ish), so they taste like strawberries instead of like nothing. We got one small box last week, and they were so good that we bought a lot of them the next time we went grocery shopping. They soon started to get pruny and squishy, and I didn't want to lose them.
I could have suspended the berries in red Jello. As many have noted before me, gelatin is surprisingly good at extending the lifespan of fresh produce. But today, I wanted to adopt my great-grandmother's apricot whip. Instead of stewing apricots, we're blenderizing strawberries.
After a good pulverization, I ran the strawberries through a sieve. This was the only tedious(ish) part of this whole recipe, but would you want all these seeds and stringy bits in your pink fluff?
As soon as I realized I was making "pink fluff," I had horrible visions of the ballistic-grade pink pie we made a while ago.
And also, pink fluff is one of the more infamous midcentury desserts. It's almost a symbol of the insipid "cooking" that involved creatively dumping three cans into one bowl. But then I figured this is literally strawberries and cream (with some gelatin to keep it from deflating, of course).
Speaking of strawberries, I decided they needed a bit of artificial assistance to look their best after getting blenderized. Fruit is rarely fruit-colored enough.
This reminds me a lot of the cream of strawberry pie we made a while ago. Both of them are basically strawberries and whipped cream. And both of them looked so pretty at this stage.
This recipe was agreeably fast since we didn't have to wait on a pot of simmering dried fruit. Only ten minutes after sprinkling the gelatin over the water, we were ready to, as the recipe says, "Chill and serve." And then, of course, we discovered that the bowl-scrapings were delicious.
This wasn't as magical as I fantasized it would be, but it was still very good indeed. It did get a bit bland in the refrigerator, though- which surprised me. I know strawberry is perhaps the most inoffensive of artificial flavors, but the actual fruits tend to actually have a taste. So while this isn't necesessarily the best way to appreciate fresh strawberries, it's pretty good if they've slipped just a bit past it.
Your ballistics grade pink pie still makes me smile. I'm wondering if it would help if you blended in some cocoa powder. Cocoa powder will blend in when you're whipping cream, but it gets kind of dusty unless you get the powder thoroughly wet first, but it doesn't clump up.
ReplyDeleteI will never forget that pie.
DeleteAnd you know, a two layer chocolate strawberry fluff sounds so good! I wouldn't be so masochistic as to attempt double layers, though. I would just spoon one over the other and call it good enough.
It looks really pretty! And you could always just use strawberry gelatin to give it color and reinforce the actual strawberry flavor. (But then, if you were going to go that route, you'd probably just suspend them in red Jell-O and not mess with all the blending and straining.)
ReplyDeleteThank you!
DeleteAnd yeah, if I was getting out strawberry Jello I would just suspend them in it to be lazy. Though I might let them soak in sugar for a while first because they were so. so. good.
Last night a friend brought over some strawberries that weren't going to make it another day without some sort of intervention, and I knew exactly what I was going to do with them. So I started out by putting 2 tbsp of gelatin in 1 tbsp of water (with a squirt of lemon juice) and thought that the ratio didn't look right. Several minutes later I added more water, and then some more, and had to microwave it longer to get it to dissolve into a thick, gluey liquid. Since I was too tired to strain anything, I just chucked the strawberries in the food processor and let it do its magic. I also added some frozen blueberries, and since I was too tired to whip cream, I just dumped it in the bowl and said good enough. Then I looked at all those cold ingredients and my bowl of gelatin and thought that it was immediately going to turn into dessert gristle when it hit the cold liquid. I kept looking at the directions wondering if I read the amounts right, but I hoped that the food processor would be enough to deal with the gelatin. After a thorough blending I tried a small bowl and found globs of gelatin in it. Today it is obvious that at least a little gelatin emulsified into it and did what it was supposed to. Was it supposed to be 2 tsp of gelatin instead of 2 tbsp? Thankfully the dessert gristle doesn't have any flavor really, so while noticeable it's not a deal breaker for anyone who has tried it.
ReplyDelete