Fancy a jellyfish jelly? This is one I made for the Oxford Food Symposium Mad Hatter’s Tea Party on Friday.
It’s just a home-made lime-and-lemon jelly with plenty of sliced jellyfish and some gouqi berries for colour.
As you might expect, the jellyfish is transparent and has a jelly-like consistency, although one slightly more taut and elastic than that of the actual jelly. It’s completely tasteless, so please don’t imagine this lovely tea-time jelly has a fishy flavour to it.
Like jelly, jellyfish has a very satisfactory wobble when moved from side to side (hang a strand from the end of your spoon and see).
Has anyone else tried making a jellyfish jelly?
Here’s the recipe, as far as I can remember it:
海蜇冻 Jellyfish jelly
Ingredients
Seven limes
One lemon
Two packs of ready-to-eat jellyfish (each 150g)
175g white sugar
Six gelatine leaves
One 20g piece of ginger, skin-on, slightly crushed
4 tbsp dried gouqi berries
Method
- Place the jellyfish (which should be already sliced) in a sieve and rinse thoroughly. Then soak in cold water until ready to use. (You won’t need any flavouring sachets you find in the pack for this recipe.)
- Cover the gouqi berries in cold water and set aside until ready to use.
- Cover the gelatine leaves in cold water and leave to soften.
- Squeeze all the limes and the lemon. Place their juices in a pan with 450ml water, the ginger and the sugar. Heat gently, stirring from time to time, to dissolve the sugar, and then bring to the boil. Allow to cool for ten minutes.
- Then pour off a little of the hot liquid, add the drained gelatine leaves and allow them to dissolve. Add this mixture to the rest of the juice and mix well. Shake the jelly fish dry and add it to the juice mixture. Allow to cool.
- Wet a one-litre jelly mould. When the liquid is tepid, stir in the drained gouqi berries and pour into the mould. Refrigerate for several hours or overnight to set. Turn onto a plate to serve.
