Jelly Of The Month Club: Garlic Jelly

Oh yes, readers, it’s back for another year: Jelly of the Month Club! In case you’re a new reader or just need a refresher, feel free to check out our first post from 2013 which explains the inspiration behind the Achievement.

The TL;DR version of Jelly of the Month is this: each month, we will choose a jelly to enjoy and evaluate. Last year’s rule that the jelly must be chosen in the month in which it is eaten has been waived; we can now select jellies ahead of time to eat in a later month. Each jelly will be evaluated on a five-point scale (5 being the best) for the following characteristics:

a. color
b. flavor
c. jelly-ness
d. jar presentation
e. awesomeness

and will generally be sampled on an English muffin or toast, as well as on crackers with peanut butter, unless the type of jelly does not lend itself to being enjoyed in these forms, which brings us to January 2014’s Jelly of the Month.

We picked this jar of jelly up on our trip to Gilroy, the Garlic Capital last year, but never got around to eating it because… well… what do you put it on?

Garlic is probably my favorite cooking ingredient of all time, and I’ve been known to sneak it into all sorts of dishes, from mashed potatoes to pasta to salads and even omelets. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how we were going to use garlic jelly on anything.

Finally, we decided to just put it on toast. Obviously, it wasn’t going to go with peanut butter, and while it might have been passable on an English muffin, it just didn’t seem right. So onto wheat toast it went.

First off, it stunk. Like… stunk-in-a-non-garlic-way. I love the way the kitchen smells when we’re cooking with garlic, so it definitely wasn’t a garlic stink that the jelly was giving off. I don’t think it was past its date or anything, but this is what I would imagine the smell would be like if a construction worker came home, took off his work boots, and rubbed garlic all over his socks.

We were a little apprehensive to taste it, but I thought, let’s hold our noses and give it a shot anyway.

I couldn’t do it. I took two bites and had to throw the toast out. It was just all wrong. It was too sweet to have so much garlic in it, and the garlic flavor somehow got lost, so all you could taste was nasty jiggly grody chunky goo. Ugh.

We couldn’t even share this one with Lucy, because dogs aren’t allowed to have garlic, so there was no way to incorporate her impartial palate in the evaluation.

color: 2 – it was kind of snot-colored
flavor: 1
jelly-ness: 3 – it was jelly-like in consistency
jar presentation: 4 – okay, it’s got a little garlic bulb dude holding his nose. That’s pretty awesome for a jelly jar.
awesomeness: 2 – there was no saving this one.

So, it’s pretty well settled that we won’t be embarking upon garlic jelly again any time soon. If it had managed to maintain more of its garlic flavor, it could have been a great substitute for butter to make garlic bread, but it just didn’t happen.

Sadness.