Panna Cotta Is Milk Jello

Panna cotta, flavored with vanilla and served with softened rosehip jam as sauce.

Panna cotta, flavored with vanilla and served with softened rosehip jam as sauce.

All those milky, eggy, usually sweetened, custards and puddings like crème caramel and flan, and panna cotta which is the one with no eggs, usually scare the daylights out of me to make and unmold. I love to eat them when someone else makes them, and I know I just ought to get over it. It is not a New Year’s resolution exactly but it occurred to me that doing things that I am not good at until I can do them easily might be a good idea.

So I thought I would start with panna cotta. This dish comes from Italy though it is actually a very old way of working with milk and sugar; it used to be made with rennet, the stuff from a calves stomach that coagulates milk and is used in cheese making. I made one once from an English recipe written in the 1600s which was flavored with rosewater. Not bad.

The modern panna cotta uses gelatin to firm up the milk and cream and when I put it together I thought, hmmm, milk jello! It isn’t as easy as opening a package and dumping hot water on it, but assembling it is very simple. It mainly requires paying attention to the temperature of the milk when you dissolve the gelatin in it: not too hot. Then one needs nerves of steel to turn it out of the molds or the bowl it chilled in.

Because panna cotta is plain, it is susceptible to decorating with berries, fruit sauces, chocolate, and stuff like that. It is also possible to make savory versions. I ate a cauliflower panna cotta once with crabmeat salad on top. Wow, was that ever wonderful! Elegant. Another friend makes it with almond milk, and apparently there are versions using coconut milk, too. I have a lot to look forward to.

Meanwhile, here is a simple panna cotta using only milk, sugar, cream, gelatin, and vanilla. For cream, you can use light, whipping or heavy depending on your taste. In fact, you can use half-and-half. Whole milk is highly recommended because skim apparently is prone to separating. If you don’t unmold it, no one will care. Just eat it with a spoon straight out of the bowl.

The panna cotta is firm enough that it doesn't slide out of the bowl without being dunked in hot water first.

The panna cotta is firm enough that it doesn’t slide out of the bowl without being dunked in hot water first.

P.S. It was great hearing from Diane Perry and Jeannie Tabor about the squash recipes the last two weeks. I was worried that since Toby was tired of eating them, you might be tired of reading about them. Diane wrote “Roasted squash and pasta. Sounds great. You can bet I cut that recipe out!!!!” And Jeannie said, “I tried today’s recipe–Squash & Black Bean casserole and it was excellent!” She grew butternuts by accident; they really wanted butter cup. “Don’t really care much for the butternut, so have been trying to figure out how to get rid of them. Problem solved.”

Panna Cotta Is Milk Jello
Recipe type: Dessert
Serves: 6-8
 
A simple, vanilla flavored panna cotta.
Ingredients
  • 1 ½ cups milk
  • 3 teaspoons unflavored gelatin
  • ⅓ cup sugar
  • 1 ½ cups cream
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
Instructions
  1. Lightly spray or grease ramekins or a bowl with cooking oil, using a paper towel to wipe up excess, leaving a thin film of oil.
  2. Put the milk in a heavy saucepan and sprinkle the gelatin over the surface of the milk. Let sit to soften for about five minutes.
  3. Warm the milk gently over a low heat, never letting it get hot enough to steam, and stirring to melt the gelatin. Take up a spoonful to check that no gelatin granules remain.
  4. When it is all melted, add the sugar, and continue to keep the milk warm while the sugar dissolves completely.
  5. Remove from the heat. Add the cream and vanilla, whisking or stirring to mix.
  6. Pour into ramekins or bowl and chill until it is firm.
  7. Set up a bowl of very hot water large enough to accommodate the ramekins or bowl.
  8. Hold the molds in the hot water for a minute to loosen the panna cotta. If necessary, run a thin bladed knife around the edge to help release the pudding.
  9. Put a serving plate over the top of the mold, and flip it over so the panna cotta can fall out onto the plate.
  10. Garnish as desired, and serve.

 

Sandy Oliver

About Sandy Oliver

Sandy Oliver Sandy is a freelance food writer with the column Taste Buds appearing weekly since 2006 in the Bangor Daily News, and regular columns in Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors magazine and The Working Waterfront. Besides freelance food writing, she is a pioneering food historian beginning her work in 1971 at Mystic Seaport Museum, where she developed a fireplace cooking program in an 1830s house. After moving to Maine in 1988, Sandy wrote, Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and Their Foods at Sea and Ashore in the 19th Century published in 1995. She is the author of The Food of Colonial and Federal America published in fall of 2005, and Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving History and Recipes from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie which she co-authored with Kathleen Curtin. She often speaks to historical organizations and food professional groups around the country, organizes historical dinners, and conducts classes and workshops in food history and in sustainable gardening and cooking. Sandy lives on Islesboro, an island in Penobscot where she gardens, preserves, cooks and teaches sustainable lifeways.