Reflections on Synchronized Swimming: Not So Kid-Friendly Citrus Jelly

The only differences between the kid-friendly jelly I made and this not-so-kid-friendly jelly are you need a whole lot more patience for this one, and the recipe is unnecessarily complicated, but you get whole chunks of fruit that pop in your mouth, which is very cool...and un-grown-up-like. It also looks cooler. See how my choice of vocabulary reflects my preference for childish things in this instance.

Really, the length of time it takes to make this recipe is a draw-back, but the result is delicious and unique. Make sure you measure the fruit as you go or you may end up dissecting the right number of fruit but still end up with way too much of it, which may or may be a waste of your life. I think the funny part of this recipe is that it comes just BEFORE the kid-friendly jelly recipe in di Stasio's cookbook, as if once you've made this recipe you'll never want to do it again and the kid version will look mighty appealing when you turn the page. Like a brain massage after a math test.

Ingredients
7-8 regular sized navel or blood oranges, 4-5 massive ones
3-4 normal pink grapefruit, 2 meal-sized grapefruit (the ones that are bigger than a softball)
3 tbsp sugar, 4 if you use the huge fruit, 5 if they're not that sweet (or honey or agave)
2 tbsp gelatin (two packets)

So this looks easy. 4 ingredients! It's only easy if you're a good pith-remover. Not to be confused with being a good "pither"...lets keep this jelly as friendly as possible...Maybe you should use agar-agar instead of gelatin? Jelly is far from animal-friendly or vegan...

Cut the top and bottom off all the fruit, then remove as much of the skin and white membrane as possible, working your way from top to bottom all around each fruit. It's better to remove too much than too little. You'll save yourself a lot of time later when the rest of the membranes just fall off instead of sticking stubbornly to the fruit.

Then take a sharp knife and cut into the fruit on both sides of the white membrane that separates the fruit into segments. Cut very, very close to the membrane so you don't waste too much fruit. This whole process is very wasteful, and I generally eat the membrane as I go or once it's accumulated, since it's so sad to see all the delicious fruit go to waste for a silly presentation. But that's often how cooking goes, sadly. After you've cut in to the core all the way around the fruit segments should start falling out of their own accord. You can encourage this by gently opening the fruit and removing the segments with your hands. You will probably need to use your sharp knife to help it along, or scrape some of the little exploding capsules of juice that got left behind if your knife skills are, like mine, less than spectacular. 2 1/2 hours later I had successfully segmented 12 enormous pieces of fruit. Unfortunately, then I read the instruction that you only need 4 cups of the segments. I had 8. Double recipe time!

Anyway, do all this pith-removing over a sieve to catch the juices. I briefly considered taking some of my hard-won segments and puréeing them and then sieving them to turn them into juice, since you need 1 1/2 cups of the juice, but I couldn't do it. It would be such a waste of all my pith-removing. So I added some lychee juice to the cup of juices that had dripped through the sieve while I had worked, to give me the required cup and a half.

Then you dissolve the honey or sugar in this juice. Just stir it in. It doesn't really have to dissolve since hot liquid will be added shortly and do all your dissolving work for you.

Take a small saucepan and add 1/4 cup of the juice (1/2 cup for a double recipe, and a wider saucepan). Then sprinkle the gelatin over top. I messed this up. Stupid non-kid-friendly jelly...My saucepan wasn't very wide and the gelatin had to sit on top of itself instead of "blooming" properly on the juice. What the heck does that mean? It gelatinizes. There are no buds of flowers involved. No intoxicating smell of Spring. What a scam, I thought, as I stood in my chilly kitchen, dreaming of daffodils.

Five minutes into this supposed blooming process you turn the stove burner to low and let the gelatin melt. This took forever. The gelatin really didn't want to melt, so I turned the heat up a bit. It shouldn't have made a difference. I remember my synchronized swimming days when you take a kettle of boiling water and you dissolve knox gelatin in a small bowl. Then you take a paintbrush and paint your hair with it so it stays in place in a very tight bun. Just pray the person assisting you is good with a paintbrush, because dripping boiling gelatin is not a good thing to have land on your ears and shoulders.

So why can't you just bring the fruit juice here to a boil and then pour it over the gelatin? After the gelatin melts in the recipe you add the rest of the fruit juice, which cools down the liquid and makes your metaphorical "bun" of dessert into a gloopy, chunky, unappetizing thing. You've got to somehow then pour it over the fruit. Well, that wasn't going to work, so I had to reheat the gelatin. I don't exactly fully understand the properties of gelatin, but I figured it probably shouldn't be reheated. In swimming when the gelatin solidified before it could be painted onto your head you just added more boiling water and stirred. Problem solved. So I reheated the gelatin on the stove. Not the same as pouring more hot liquid over it (next time I would soften it over low heat like the recipe said but then I would boil the remaining juice so that when it got added to the gelatin it would dissolve it instead of solidifying it), but not horrible. The mixture got poured over the fruit and the two big bowls of dessert got stuck in the fridge to become jelly. Unfortunately, they started turning white around the edges of the fruit, the same way gelatin-painted hair got white and gross when it had been sitting at room temperature too long. No one cared, especially me, since it tasted great, but it certainly was not as pretty as the port glasses of jelly in the picture in the recipe book. Obviously, this recipe would have been very different if di Stasio had been a synchronized swimmer...