What is the reaction that creates jello? Or gelatin? A friend and I were talking about it and couldn’t find it on Google. So what’s the lowdown on jello here?
You’ll have to dig thru the dogpile for this one.
The last chemistry class I took was in high school, but IIRC, there’s no “reaction” in the technical sense that makes gelatin stand up. Reactions are when two elements molecularly fuse together in some way to make a compound. Jello is not chemically different than powdered horse hooves and water, they’re just in a different arrangement in the gelatin than they are before you make the stuff (and the powder is sitting in your cupboard, and the water in the municipal resevoir).
Anyway, I seem to remember that gelatin is a colloidal suspension, a type of mixture that is similar to a solution, but where the “dissolved” particles are too big to form a true solution. The gelatin proteins form a lattice that traps water inside, IIRC.
–Cliffy