How to cook jelly pork legs: a favorite Russian snack

Jellied meat is now prepared from a wide variety of products. For example, as a meat part, you can use beef, veal, pork, poultry. For flavors - carrots, onions, garlic, as well as spices and herbs. But in any recipe, the most important thing is pork or beef legs. And then we will tell you how to cook jelly from pork legs. But before that, let's delve into the story. Has jelly always been cooked that way?

Jellied History

The distant “ancestor” of the modern aspic was the usual rich meat soup or broth. Such a dish could be fully saturated and restore strength. When the broth with pieces of meat froze, it became like a jelly. This was due to the fact that the bones and meat of animals contain special gelling substances. But at that time it was rather a lack of food, as the frozen soup had to be heated.

The cold form of this dish was taken by the peoples of the North. They also cooked boiled meat soups with spices and herbs, but then they specially brought them out to frost. In this form, the dish could be taken with you on long trips or hunting. In cold conditions, it did not deteriorate, and if necessary, it could be heated at the stake and get soup. Here is such a universal solution!

An interesting fact: at first in Russia, the jelly was a second-rate dish. In rich houses, after lush feasts on the second day, they collected all the remnants of food, chopped them, poured broth, boiled. Then they poured it into the dishes and set it in the cold. As a rule, such a dish was given to the servants.

Everything has changed with the advent of fashion for everything French. French chefs showed us how to cook jellied meat: they brought grace and taste to this dish. So on the tsar’s table also appeared jellied fish, decorated with all kinds of vegetables and seasoned with spices. Ordinary people preferred meat, inventing hours-long boiling, so that it better departed from the bones. And if you still season the jelly with mustard or horseradish, it’s not a shame to serve the master’s table!

But back to our recipe. Now you will learn how to cook a delicious pork leg jelly in all its details!

Pork Leg Jelly Recipe

Many are afraid of the lengthy process of cooking jellied meat. In fact, aspic cooked for a long time, but not difficult. Each hostess just needs to try once to make sure of this!

Home-made food is good because it never gets boring for the simple reason that every housewife cooks differently and each time. As they say, once at a time is not necessary. And jelly from pork legs is no exception, so the alignment of products is approximate. Each hostess decides to her taste what and how much to put there.

Photo: © Depositphotos.com/ppi09

We will need:

• 4 pork legs
• 0.5 kg of pork
• 1 medium carrot
• 1 onion,
• peppercorns,
• ground pepper
• 2 bay leaves,
• 20 g of gelatin
• 3-4 cloves of garlic,
• salt pepper.

So, we start cooking jellied meat.

1. We thoroughly wash the pork legs, put in a pan and pour so much water that the legs were covered for five to six centimeters.
2. After boiling, remove the foam and note the time.We put on a very slow fire and continue to cook for exactly four hours, from time to time removing the fat that appears on the surface. Slow cooking and fat removal give the broth transparency and a special delicate taste.
3. We pour a glass of broth and cool. Pour gelatin with cooled broth.
4. Add meat to the pan and cook for another hour.
5. We cut onions and carrots into cubes, add to the broth along with bay leaf and black pepper, peas. Salt to taste.
6. Cook for another hour. In total, the pork jelly recipe will take six hours of cooking. Please note: in no case should you add water!
7. We get a piece of meat, legs, cool them a little, separate the meat from the bones. We cut everything into small pieces.
8. The resulting meat is put in the broth, bring to a boil. Add gelatin, garlic and ground pepper dissolved in the broth.
9. Pour the hot broth into plates or tins.
10. Cool to room temperature and put in the refrigerator for solidification.

Now you know how to make jelly meat from pork legs. But it is worth adding that the jellied meat is not only a tasty and satisfying dish, but also very healthy. Due to the high collagen content, pork leg jelly has beneficial effects not only on our skin condition, but also helps to restore cartilage in diseases such as arthrosis, arthritis, osteochondrosis. Jellied meat is especially useful for fractures for quick bone growth and subsequent recovery.

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