bulka wrote:

> I can understand doing this for fun, as a novelty, bored in the
> kitchen, but how is olive jello better than an olive?

It's not olive jello. It's like a little gelatin sac filled with liquid
olive. Many people like the texture and the burst of flavor.

José Andrés might have misrepresented what he was actually doing. He stated
that one bowl contained olive purée and the other one contained liquid
gelatin. I don't think that combination would work. When Fabio Viviani did
it on Top Chef, he put sodium alginate into the olive mixture, then spooned
the mixture into a bath containing calcium chloride. That's the standard way
of making that kind of fake caviar. (Another way is to put calcium gluconate
into the olive mixture and drop it into a sodium alginate solution.) I'm
guessing that Andrés didn't want to confuse or scare the audience or the
host of the show, so he simplified the explanation.

Bob