Homemade Marshmallows = Ugly

(Yes, that is an entirely accurate artist's rendering of the marshmallows, and no they did not deserve an actual photograph. Now on to the review. Shush.)

Before I went veggie, I didn't realize just how many foods have gelatin in them. I mean, there was the obvious Jell-o, but other than that I really didn't think about it. In addition, I didn't know that gelatin was such a gross, carcass-filled thing. For those of you who may not know already, gelatin is a glutinous substance that is the result of boiling ligaments, bones, skin, and other leftover parts of dead animals in water. I can't imagine who thought to do this for the first time, and who then decided to use the globby muck to make things like jelly and candy, but they must have been one crazy mofo (Bill Cosby, was that you?!).

Sooo it may have been my lovely veggie friend (see earlier posts) who clued me in, or it may have been some of the books I read before becoming a vegetarian, but luckily I learned quickly about the horrors of gelatin and cut that poop out of my diet right away. Sadly getting rid of gelatin also meant getting rid of Skittles, Starburst, most brands of gummy candy, most yogurts, marshmallows, and more. I happened to become a vegetarian on a beautiful summer day, smack-dab in the middle of prime camping season. And at the time, that meant no roasted marshmallows or s'mores for me - boooo. I found a company online that makes vegan marshmallows (I did eventually purchase these and I promise to review them at some point), but they take kind of a long time to ship and I was in a hurry. So. I looked up a few recipes... Most of them were pretty much the same, with ingredients including sugar, salt, vanilla, water, corn syrup, cornstarch, and most importantly agar (basically the vegan equivalent of gelatin).

You will often see agar and carageenan in vegetarian products that have jelly-ish (not to be confused with jelly-fish! teehee) properties. It was difficult to find agar at a store nearby. I ended up coming across it at a small vegetarian shop in downtown Ottawa, and it was very expensive - about $10 Canadian for a package that was roughly half the size of a small bag of chocolate chips. It was a clear plastic package and the agar looked like tiny translucent white flakes. Luckily you only need very small amounts in most recipes, so at least the purchase wasn't entirely uneconomical.

I swear on all things holy that I followed the recipe instructions to the best of my ability - and I'm not a bad cook! I dutifully soaked a couple of teaspoons of agar in cold water for a while, and meanwhile cooked the other ingredients in a pan on the stove up to what I THOUGHT was the required "firmball stage" (118 degrees Celsius or 244 degrees Fahrenheit). You apparently need to stick a candy thermometer into the mixture to test this. I couldn't find one and therefore tried to use a meat thermometer, which was clearly idiotic since it didn't measure high enough. Supposedly something has reached the firmball stage when you can drop some of it into a glass of water and it forms little balls? I don't know. I guess it was beyond me.

From my understanding, my mixture never reached the firmball point, or maybe just went way past it, because at that temperature you are supposed to pour it over your agar-water mixture and then blend it together with a hand-mixer, and then it will turn into a fluffy white substance, which you pour into a pan, dust with cornstarch, and let sit overnight. It never became puffy and white. It was a greyish, brownish, sticky muck. I loaded it up with cornstarch in a vain attempt to hide its hideousness, but that just made it worse. I tried to cut it into marshmallow shapes, but imagine trying to cut shapes out of something akin to Vaseline. It ain't gonna happen.

Amazingly, dumbfoundingly, the muck tasted a lot like real marshmallows. I don't know why or how. But I couldn't bring myself to eat more than a tablespoon or two. It was too much. And the pan was a royal pain in the arse to clean when I finally got around to it. Ugh. Factoring in the price, the time, the effort, and the insanely disappointing final product, I would say it's a terrible idea to try to make these again. Look at that picture, kids! Look at it and then look at a real marshmallow. Exactly.