Fruits dress up gelatins

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Bright, jiggly and playful, flavored gelatin has long been a crowd-pleaser, but it can also be full of sugar and artificial coloring and have little nutritionalvalue. How to make it healthy? Take a tip from top toques.

Gelatin, or in French-chef lingo "gelee," has been showing up frequently on the foodie circuit as pastry chefs upscale it with fruit and other flavors. Yet these are not the molds of old.

At Cyrus Restaurant in California's Sonoma County, pastry chef Annie Clemmons bids diners good night with a parting "Jell-O shot" made of foodie flavors like pomegranate, hibiscus with gold leaf, and Gewurztraminer.

In Washington, Frank Morales, executive chef of Zola, makes a grown-up "creamsicle" of mandarin orange and vanilla cream gelatin over a vanilla wafer with bitter chocolate sauce. In Las Vegas at the Restaurant in the Platinum Hotel and Spa, executive chef Brent Hammer conjures a "whipped honey cloud" dessert made of gelatin and honey.

"Jell-O is a great finale to a meal because you can do it in advance," says Kate Neumann, pastry chef at MK, a restaurant in Chicago, where her gelatin uses fruit, yogurt and effervescent soda with suspended bubbles.

"Gelatin tends to dull the flavor of things. People use sugar to make it taste like something," she says. Instead of sweetener, Miss Neumann picks ingredients with big flavor, such as very strong ginger ale or extremely ripe fruit.

Most gelatin sold in supermarkets comes in powder form and must be dissolved in water in a process known as "blooming." It then is heated and melted, but not boiled, before it is left to set.

Normally sold in powdered form, gelatin is a protein derived by curing and processing animal bones and skins, but vegetarian versions may be made from plants and seaweed, such as agar powder, and are sold online and in health-food stores.

In the grocery store, look for nonflavored gelatins, such as the Knox brand, to experiment with the recipes here.

Chefs, who put awe on the plate for a living, often use gelee only as an accessory to a dessert, accompanying cakes or sorbets, for example. Home-cooking mortals can and should consider it a solo dessert or salad.