One of Andy's favorite desserts is panna cotta, an Italian egg-less custard that is served chilled. I've had panna cotta on my "to do" list for over a year, but the main sticking point (ha, pun intended!) has been finding a suitable gelatin substitute to make it a vegetarian recipe. While searching the internet a several months ago, I discovered "agar agar", a Japanese dried seaweed that some home cook-bloggers have used for homemade vegetarian panna cotta. It took me a few months to focus and actually find agar agar myself -- which I finally did at a local Whole Foods (though nowhere near the baking section which had gelatin, rather in the Asian foods section).
At that point, I had to find a suitable recipe. Most recipes on the internet that use agar agar are vegan, so they use different types of non-dairy milks and yogurts (e.g., coconut milk, soy yogurt, etc) to construct the custard. Given that Andy and I are not vegan, I wanted to use a standard dairy panna cotta and realized that I would probably just have to adapt a regular panna cotta recipe to an agar agar, vegetarian-based one. I finally settled on a simple, plain vanilla panna cotta recipe from Epicurious.com.
I whisked the salvageable agar agar mixture into the dairy mixture in the hopes of breaking the agar agar chunks into smaller pieces so it would be easier for it to dissolve in the hot liquid. I let this cook for about 25 - 30 minutes, to where it seemed that only a relatively few amount of smaller chunks remained, and then transferred the mixture into the serving cups to cool. I set the cups in the fridge for about 2 hours before they seemed set, and then Andy and I tried the result.
Unfortunately, the chunks of agar agar were still noticeable in the otherwise smooth panna cotta, and Andy likened it to bubble tea, which has tapioca pearls within the drink. Needless to say, Andy is not a fan of bubble tea, which describes how the result tasted. The remaining agar agar flakes ensured some sticky blobs within the panna cotta, and the panna cotta itself was a little stiff and not as creamy as panna cotta we have had in Italian restaurants. So the rest of the untouched panna cotta (6 additional servings) was not consumed.
Despite this experience, I still think that an tasty agar agar-based panna cotta is still possible. The steps that I will use next time will be to: 1) grind the agar agar flakes into a powder before placing it directly into the dairy mixture to uniformly warm and dissolve (instead of cooking it separately with a small amount of water which will like make it a thick paste that won't dissolve into the larger dairy mixture), 2) decreasing the amount of agar agar to 1.5 times that which is called for in the recipe, instead of 3 times, to reduce some of the stiffness of the result, and 3) to cook the mixture for as long as it takes for the agar agar to fully dissolve, and not quitting when it seems "mostly" dissolved. Given how easy panna cotta is generally to make, I don't think these substitutions will be hard to incorporate -- and I look forward to doing so as soon as we recover from how bad my first attempt was :-)
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