The Simplest and Best Way to Cure Olives

By Gerald Smith
If you are lucky enough to have your own olive trees, you will know how bitter raw olives taste straight from the tree. The bitterness is left behind with the pulp when olives are pressed to make oil, but if you want to prepare them for eating - and spare the expense of a press - the fruit must first must be processed, or 'cured'. Although there are several ways to do this, this article will outline the simplest - and in my experience the best - method, which uses only salt. It's the way olives have been cured in Greece for at least three thousand years.
Ripe olives generally include a mixture of black and green fruit. The black olives are the riper ones, but don't wait to harvest them until all of them are black. When the majority of the olives on the tree are black, all of them are ready for picking. Don't wait for the olives to fall from the tree, because by that time many of them will be spoiled. The following cure works equally well on both black and green olives.
Remove any stems and leaves, and wash the fruit in a bucket using fresh water. Pour away the dirty water and spread the olives across a clean table or floor.
Using a sharp knife or fork, make three or four cuts in the skin of each olive. These incisions will enable the salt water to draw the bitterness out of the fruit - the treatment won't work without them.
Dissolve 120 grams of salt into each liter of a bucket of clean water. Throw the the pricked olives into this solution, using an upturned plate to ensure that every olive is submerged. Note that this is about three times the concentration of salt in seawater, so don't use seawater as a substitute.
After 24 hours, pour the liquid away and replace with clean saline water of the same concentration. Repeat this step daily for about 12 days. After 10 days, taste an olive or two each day: continue this washing cycle until every trace of bitterness has gone.
When the washing process is completed and the olives are edible, they are ready to be stored. Pour away the last of the saline solution and dry the olives. Place them into sealable storage jars, topping up the jars with olive oil. If you want, you can add flavorings to the oil: garlic, basil and lemon juice are particular favorites. Ensure that every olive is submerged in the oil, then seal the jar. Store the olives in a cool, dark place.
Although this method is both cheap and simple, it is also quite labor-intensive, and therefore unsuitable for commercial quantities of fruit. The finished product, however, is delicious: those chemically-treated, mass-produced olives that you can buy for a fortune at the local delicatessen will never taste the same again.
Gerald Smith is a technical consultant at [http://www.smithgcb.demon.co.uk/]Piedmont Properties, a real estate agency specializing in Italian vineyards.
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