Curing olives, for the eating
By: Josh Livni
Tags: Canning, Olives, Food

Here in Davis, we have lots of olive trees lining the streets, and I find most of them fall to the ground unused, except as skateboard obstacles. What to do with them?

Olive oil would be great, but it takes a lot of olives to make olive oil (1:5 or 1:10 weight ratio yield), and it’s kind of a hassle. Meanwhile cured olives cost more per pre-processed pound, and there’s more opportunity to tweak small batch flavors. So I do that instead. Here’s some notes.

Picking

First, it’s useful to know when to pick. The key piece here is that the difference between a green and black olive is just how ripe it is (you’ll find both on the same tree).

Woah, different color olives on the same branch!

Very generally, green olives are hard and I use them mostly for a lye-based treatment. Green/brown olives are good for a salt-brine, and dark, softer, olives are great for a salt cure (e.g. the shriveled Moroccan style olives).

Experts will tell you the best picking time depends on the variety and the weather and so forth — and it does — but basically just pay attention to when they start to turn dark and then either go for it (if you want green olives) or wait a month (if you want more ripe).

Actually picking

This is surprisingly easy. Get a metal rake and a large tarp, and rake the olives onto the tarp. I just aim for the low hanging fruit, but if you want to optimize your yield per tree, bring a ladder as well. I usually hit a couple trees and get a few 5 gallon buckets full in less then 10 minutes. Of course your timing will depend on the individual tree, and how long you want to risk getting caught. Haha obviously only grab from public trees.

Sorting

This is the most annoying part of the whole process. I’m slowly working to automate this, but for now I force my family to help. Here’s the general flow:

You probably got a bunch of bad olives and leaves and branches mixed in from the last step. If you have a lot of olives it might be worth pouring them into a bucket full of water from a fair height, with a blower that blows all the leaves/twigs away as they fall. Otherwise just pick them out.

Next, take out all the bad olives. Some people seem very concerned about any olives with small holes (or hints of them), in case it means the dreaded fruit fly has gotten in. But unless the olive looks pretty gnarly I don’t think it will affect the processing or the taste/texture, and I’m not a vegetarian. Also I’d lose a lot of olives.

When you’re done, you want to organize them by color, and size if there is lots of variance. This is because different sizes/colors will take different amounts of time to cure for a given method (except for salt-curing in which case you can skip sizing).

Curing

Finally, you’re ready for this long PDF with all the details on how to cure olives: It does a way better job than I will, but here’s my summary:

The easiest (and survey says best-tasting) method is lye-curing. The only real downside here is you have to eat them within a few months, whereas the other methods let you store for much longer. Oh and also it’s a deadly poison that could blind you or worse if you screw up while processing. But the olives taste great and it’s by far the easiest method.

Here’s how you do it: Make a lye solution (see instructions in pdf and wear eye protection), soak the olives for ~10 hours, rinse (carefully putting lye solution down your house drain and not storm drain), and then rinse again daily for a few days+. Always make sure your olives are submerged through these steps and beyond. Now you’re done!

To give them more flavor, throw them in a salt brine and whatever aromatics you want (this year I’ve been inclined to just add garlic and hot peppers). In just a few hours (but a day+ is better) they’ll acquire the taste of whatever you put them in. You can also replace their flavor if it didn’t turn out great by replacing the brine.

Other methods include: salt curing (just put dark olives in lots of salt and wait) and salt-brining, which requires making a cut into each olive and is thus a bit more time consuming.

Conclusion

Homemade olives are cheap and yum.