[Sca-cooks] gelatin vs. renet

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Samrah:
>Can anybody tell me the difference or when it is appropriate to use 
>one instead of the other?  Does it make a difference in milk dishes, 
>like cremes?  And do any of you have a preference in brands of 
>gelatins, either for general effectiveness or cost efficiency?

AEllin touched on this briefly, but something crossed my mind that I 
felt should be added.

I'm not sure where gelatin features as a classic, traditional 
addition to a dairy product like milk. Yes, you can add it, and it'll 
gel, but what you get is a milk jelly or perhaps a white leach 
(assuming it's firm enough to be sliced). You don't get junket, 
curds, or cheese.

Using rennet, either as junket tablets (which form weak curds 
specifically designed for junket), or in more concentrated form, 
either as tablets or in the form of a liquid sometimes used in making 
cheeses, you get something more familiar in the cheesemaker's art.

And yes, this is what AEllin mentioned, but what just occurred to me 
is that when using gelatin to set milk, you can't really drain off 
any significant amount of water, so a quart of milk is a quart of 
white leach. If you're calculating numbers of servings, this is an 
important distinction.

Junket (whose name appears to derive from the woven basket 
traditionally used to drain the uncut curds), is drained, if only 
slightly, so you'd lose some mass in the finished product; a quart of 
milk would not make, say, eight four-ounce servings.

Adamantius