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I don’t know if I even need an intro for this one. It’s Jellied. Hamburger. Loaf.

AuthorRetroRuth

From Our Best Hamburger Recipes by Martha Logan

Tested Recipe!

[cooked-sharing]

 1 pound hamburger
 1 tsp salt
 ½ cup chopped onion
 ½ cup chopped celery
 2 tbsp gelatin
 ½ cup cold water
 2 10 1/2 oz cans vegetable soup
 1 tbsp Worchestershire Sauce
 2 tbsp lemon juice

1

Add salt to hamburger. Pan-fry with onion and celery until beef has lost the pink color and onions are lightly browned. Soak gelatin in water 10 minutes. Add to heated soup. Stir well. Combine all ingredients. Pour into a 8x4 inch loaf pan. Chill 2 hours or until set.
Yield: 8 to 10 servings

Ingredients

 1 pound hamburger
 1 tsp salt
 ½ cup chopped onion
 ½ cup chopped celery
 2 tbsp gelatin
 ½ cup cold water
 2 10 1/2 oz cans vegetable soup
 1 tbsp Worchestershire Sauce
 2 tbsp lemon juice

Directions

1

Add salt to hamburger. Pan-fry with onion and celery until beef has lost the pink color and onions are lightly browned. Soak gelatin in water 10 minutes. Add to heated soup. Stir well. Combine all ingredients. Pour into a 8x4 inch loaf pan. Chill 2 hours or until set.
Yield: 8 to 10 servings

Notes

Jellied Hamburger Loaf

This is another recipe chosen for us by the lovely patrons over on our Patreon. I know I mention Patreon quite a bit, but they really are the reason why I am able to keep bringing you this great content. I don’t think I would have made this on my own, so thank you to them for choosing this recipe for me and then chatting with me through the bumps in this recipe.

Bump #1: Did you know it’s really hard to find Knox gelatin right now?  Even generic versions seem to be sold out all over!

Bump #2: I polled the electorate to see if they thought the recipe was referring to “condensed” canned soup or not. The overall answer was to just go for condensed.

Also: I used this as an excuse to bust out the alpha noodle soup!

Bump #3: They helped me get serious about this.

Okay, that wasn’t really a bump. I just wanted to spell something out on this mold. I tried to pour in some of the gelatinized broth and chill it before I put in the rest to get a layer with words in it, but it didn’t work!

At least I had my loaf moment.

And I think that was it for the bumps. At this point it started actually smelling really good, which was….not strange I guess. I mean, it’s basically meatloaf crumble into soup. I like both those things.

Oh, yes! Bump #4: I didn’t have lemon juice, so I subbed 1 tablespoon of vinegar and 1 tablespoon of water.

Glorp!  This actually made a great slurp sound when I poured it in the bowl. Sadly, Tom is back at work so I wasn’t able to capture all the squelching.

Ready for the fridge!

I covered this with plastic wrap in the fridge, and it didn’t dry out too much. You can see there is a nice, solid gel. Probably aided by the fact that I used condensed soups.

Success! It unmolded pretty well and actually smelled pretty good. I was starting to have hope.

My “Loaf” design didn’t make it. Ah, well.

Garnished and ready for action!

Tom action.

“Do you want to know what’s in this?”

“You don’t need to tell me. I can totally smell what’s in this. It smells like a sloppy joe.”

“What do you think?”

“Interesting.”

“Is it bad?”

“Nope. Put some ketchup and mustard on this and I will eat it.”

Verdict: Sloppy Joe Alphaloaf

From The Tasting Notes – 

I’m not sure if it was the vinegar or the copious amount of soup, but this tasted like cold sloppy joes. Which wasn’t a bad thing. And it makes sense, because Tom’s mom uses canned soup in her sloppy joes. So Tom was right at home with this thing. To me it also gave off taco salad vibes. Here in Michigan, if you order a taco salad it comes with cold taco meat on it, so this felt a lot like that to me. We actually ate this alphaloaf for dinner, covered with mustard and ketchup, and Alex had two slices! So it was a pretty good success at our house. I’m not sure if I’m going to make it again…because I would rather have hot sloppy joes. But if you are looking for an edible aspic for the main course, this is a good one.

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