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Can you freeze jelly? An odd question you might think, but one I was genuinely asked last week. I have a Whatsapp group with the girls and one of them had an emergency. She had a kids’ party that afternoon and had forgotten to make the jelly the night before. So she asked the group if freezing would help.
I already knew the answer having had a similar experience myself, so I was happy to help, and thought I would pass on my wisdom to you fine people as well.
Oh, and to be clear, I am talking about jelly in the English sense here. Wibble wobble jelly on a plate jelly, not the American peanut butter and jelly kind!
Technically you can freeze jelly, as in, it will go rock solid if you leave it in the freezer. However, if you want to be able to defrost it and eat it again you are going to be disappointed.
Jelly is essentially made of gelatine and water, so it obviously has a very high water content, and when you freeze it large ice crystals form. This breaks down the gelatine’s structure, and once the structure is changed, it can’t go back to exactly how it was before.
So if you were to make and freeze a jelly, then leave it to thaw and defrost, it would not look, feel, or taste the same afterwards. Defrosted jelly looks like a watery, grainy, mess.
It won’t necessarily be totally ruined, but it will definitely be a downgrade.
It shouldn’t do.
The structure of the jelly might have changed but there is nothing in there that should make you sick. Unless you have a strong reaction to the altered texture perhaps.
So you can eat jelly that has been frozen and defrosted, but it might not be particularly pleasant.
That said, people still do it. Some have even reported that the jelly wasn’t changed all that much, but in my experience it’s not very appetising.
You can eat it while it’s still frozen, but again, it wouldn’t be as nice.
There was actually a frozen jelly trend on social media for a while. I’m not sure why. This is the sort of thing they were doing:
@linder_surprise yooo this is ssooo gud 🤩😋 #fyp #asmr #frozenjello ♬ original sound – Linda
It seems to have been as much about the ASMR qualities as the jelly itself, but people were going crazy for this trend.
I tried it, and I have to say that frozen jelly is much nicer than defrosted jelly, although neither can beat the real thing.
The words ‘jelly’ and ’emergency’ are not natural neighbours in a sentence, I agree, but if you had 20 excited 6 year old bearing down on your house in a few hours time and no jelly to contain them, believe me, it would feel like an emergency!
Anyway, despite just explaining why freezing jelly is not a good idea, it can be helpful in the short term.
Jelly takes a long time to set, especially if you have a big bowl full of it rather than lots of smaller shapes. However, putting jelly in the freezer for 10 to 20 minutes can quicken the setting process without ruining the texture.
This is because the cold has enough time to thicken the gelatine, but not enough time to form ice crystals. So the part of the freezing process which breaks down the structure of the gelatine never takes place.
Clever, huh?
So you can freeze jelly to make it set faster, but only if you take it out of the freezer before it is allowed to freeze. That sounds back to front but it actually makes sense!
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