solid, or gel. This behavior can be
undesirable, for example when it causes some
sauce to congeal on the plate. But cooks also
exploit it to make delightful jellies, a sort of
solid sauce. A gel forms when the gelatin
concentration is sufficiently high, around 1%
or more of the stock’s total weight. At these
concentrations, there are enough gelatin
molecules in the stock that their long chains
can overlap with each other to form a
continuous network throughout the stock. As
the hot stock cools down to the melting
temperature of gelatin, around 100ºF/40ºC, the
extended gelatin chains begin to assume the
coiled shape that they had in the original
triple helix of the collagen fibers (p. 597).
And when coils on different molecules
approach each other, they nest closely
alongside each other and bond to form new
double and triple helixes. These reassembled
collagen junctions give some rigidity to the
network of gelatin molecules, and they and
barry
(Barry)
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