I’m a bit obsessed with herb grass jelly. Actually, I get a bit obsessed with everything that seems to have no flavour, because I’m usually convinced that it has flavour (otherwise who would buy it, who made it popular, why are there so many brands producing it?). In Montreal, you mostly see the canned version (if you see it at all), but it’s becoming more popular thanks to Asian dessert places. Or, rather, it’s very popular in some Asian countries and places with large Asian populations and now that those places are opening outlets of their dessert and bubble tea chains here (e.g. Meet Fresh, The Alley, Mango Mango), I figured there was hope to find some herb grass jelly that tasted like…something.
But after trying Meet Fresh and Mango Mango, I couldn’t really tell what the grass jelly tasted like in them. I loved the boiled peanuts and brown sugar shaved ice with sweetened stewed mung beans at Meet Fresh (a Taiwanese chain that I’m happy to occasionally pay $10 to for the privilege of customizing a giant bowl of taro or tapioca pearls or double herb grass jelly – which are some of the only gluten free and dairy free options available to me from the wide dessert menu). And I liked the herb grass jelly and mango dessert at American chain Mango Mango (almost everything on the menu has fresh, tasty mango chunks or purée in it, but I couldn’t have anything icy because of dairy and it cost more than Meet Fresh – but comes in pretty parfait glasses or goblets).
My obsession really goes back to when I was in Vietnam and I saw these women squatting in front of large plastic bowls of dark liquid-y jello at local markets. It wasn’t herb grass jelly, but it was similar in that it was a medicinal herb, stewed for a long time into a tea and thickened with agar-agar or rice powder. It was slightly bitter, slightly sweet from added sugar, like the best traditional medicine. It was also gentle on the stomach, which was essential in a country where I spent most of my time sick from hidden gluten in everything from the fish sauce to rice noodles. (Note: some kinds of herb grass jelly is thickened with wheat, which I found out when I checked the ingredients in all of the brands of canned herb grass jelly at G&D Supermarket in Montreal’s Chinatown. There were only three brands.
This was not a Herculean feat.
Neither was buying all the types of herb grass jelly available in the supermarket: the two non-gluten-containing 500 mL cans, the one package of powdered herb grass jelly (ingredients: herb grass jelly, rice flour, and an unmentioned pipette of dầu chuối, aka isoamyl acetate aka banana essence) and the single portion sundae-type serving of prepared herb grass jelly that came with an included small container of honey sweetener, though the jelly itself was already slightly sweetened, kind of like those containers of yogurt that come with their own plastic container of granola on top, package within the yogurt itself.
This was all a very foolish endeavour because I had to bike home with the heavy cans and pray to the Asian dessert gods to not let me spill the prepared sundae all over my bag. I told myself as I headed through the Old Port’s bike path that if a cruise ship tourist wandered in front of me, I had permission to go for points. (No tourists were harmed in the writing of this post.)
The Results
Herb grass jelly tastes like something! Sometimes…
The two canned versions were bland, essentially water.
The sundae container was actually pretty good. Just a tiny bit bitter and just sweet enough. I’d buy this again, closing my eyes at all the plastic waste.
But the best was the herb grass jelly powder. You dissolve the very dark powder in a measured amount of water (the directions are in English on package) and then bring it to a boil and reduce the heat to simmer until it’s thick, like making jello. The directions aren’t great, in that it doesn’t tell you precisely how long to boil the jelly, so mine ended up weaping after a day in the fridge (the liquid coming out of the jelly), but it had the strongest flavour and I could sweeten it only as much as I wanted.
I’ve been eating this a strip at a time, taking a butter knife to cut a width of it and slurping it up.
I guess I didn’t really explain the medicinal uses. It’s supposed to detoxify you and cool you. You should’t have herb grass in the winter when you’re already cold, but I read that rice paddy workers have it to help with heatstroke or sun stroke after a day of work. There’s no online mention of banana being a traditional accompaniment, but it kind of makes sense in a strange way in that’s it’s kind of banana flavoured medicine.
Delicious, cooling, medicine. I’ll take mine without banana, and preferably with shaved ice, though. Now, to find a cheap home shaved ice machine…
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