We Made a Blog

American ingenuity is sometimes faux ingenuousness over ideas taken from the Japanese. (Guess who really invented the Swiffer?) One item that unfortunately hasn’t been appropriated is coffee Jell-O. Often called “coffee jelly,” it’s just what it sounds like: a coffee-flavored gelatin dessert. You would think with coffee and Jell-O being two American staples, its adoption would be a no-brainer. But the Japanese have been enjoying this delight off-the-shelf for decades whereas here you can consider yourself lucky if you get to taste it as a special at Japanese restaurants (the luscious example above is from Sakagura). For whatever reason, it hasn’t generated the cult status that coffee jelly enjoys in Japan, where this past summer Starbucks re-released it as the starring ingredient in a limited-edition Frappuccino. For now we’ll have to settle for making coffee Jell-O from scratch. But maybe one day it will be widely available in supermarkets where grocery-shopping robots can pick it up for us.