Olives Anyone?

Curing olives is certainly a lesson in patients. In November of last year, Papaw and I decided to order fresh green olives and crack and cure them ourselves. We have never tried this before but thought, why not give it a try? We love trying new things. We enjoy time spent together researching the process, harvesting and canning. Curing our own olives sounded like a no brainer and it was. 

I had considered writing a post back in the fall when we started but decided to wait until the olives were ready for storage. I had no idea, for our taste, the curing process would be so lengthy. Curing olives takes patiences. Ripe, green olives are bitter. Removing the bitter flavor can take quite a while, as we found out. For our taste, our curing process took about 5 months which now makes me laugh to think how many blogs I read, suggested their olives were perfectly cured in a few short weeks. Maybe some people really like a bit more of a bitter bite to their olive than we do. For us to develop the flavor we desire, it took quite sometime.

After reading many other’s posts, blogs and info on curing olives we really wanted to give this a try. We ordered our olives from Chaffin Family Orchards. 

Our olives arrived in about 4 to 7 days after placing the order. They came in a set price shipping box. When opening the box, it was a treat to experience the fragrance of fresh olives. 

We spent a short time picking through and removing olives that maybe were dried out or should not be processed. We didn't really have many of those. 

We did a bit of researching on learning how to process olives. There are two methods. One way is using lye. From what we understood, curing with lye is a quicker method. For us though, the thought of using lye just wasn't so appealing. 

The other method is a brining method using salt. Salt brining sounded simpler and safer to us. 

We found a lot of useful information on processing on the Chaffin Family Orchard website. One of their suggested resources for processing and storing olives was from the University of California. You can read all about the different methods from the university here http://anrcatalog.ucdavis.edu/pdf/8267.pdf

It is pretty simple using the brining method but cracking or splitting the olives does take a bit of time. We decided since the olives were smaller olives, we didn't want to waste any by pitting them first. We don't mind chewing one then tossing the pit. 

We had read that we would need to use a food grade plastic bucket or container for the brining. We happened to have a fermenting bucket that we had purchased at a local wine maker's shop.

Using sea salt and water, we prepared our brine. We split the olives on each side using a knife. Some folks use a small mallet and give them a whack to crack them. The olives have to be split or cracked open a bit to allow the brining liquid to seep inside.

It took us a bit to split them all but we just put on a good movie and went to work on splitting them. Our fingers were a bit discolored when we finished. The olives did stain our fingers and took a few days to fade. You may want to wear rubber gloves during this step if you wish to avoid the staining. 

When finished with all the splitting, we placed a plate on top of the olives to hold them under the brine. We topped the container off with the lid and placed a piece of tape on the top with the date started. 

We left the brining bucket sitting in the kitchen so we wouldn't forget to change the brining solution often. Most things we read suggested doing it daily for the first couple of days. After the first few days, two to three times a week would be fine. We did this for several weeks, tasting each time we rinsed and re-brined the olives. Each time we tasted, we were surprised to see how much of the bitterness was still in the olive. 

Finally after many weeks, the flavor started to mellow a bit. We noticed that the olives had finally stopped floating and were staying under the brine fine without the plate holding them down. A few times when going to change the brine water, we would notice a tiny bit of mold floating on the top of the solution. We always dumped our olives into a strainer, washed and cleaned the brining bucket each time we changed the brine. 

A few weeks ago, we had delicious olives ready to be stored. For storing the olives, we used pickling salt, white vinegar and water to cover the olives. From the process information from the University of California, it suggested that the olives would need to be kept in the refrigerator and could be stored for six months or so. We have a lot of olives to eat in the next few months.

Blessings!