Olives

The time has come to harvest the olives. What to do with them?

Well, Megumi picked about 20kg a few weeks ago. Half were still green and the rest nice and ripe with black flesh. They were destined for pickling -- a somewhat fraught process that has so far involved us in one chemical emergency and lots of salt purchases.

The chemical emergency? Well, most recipes for green olive pickling revolve around lye. What's that? (Don't worry, I had to look it up too!) A solution of caustic soda (sodium hydroxide) or, in older times, potassium hydroxide. The alternative is to soak the green olives in a solution of ash, but unfortunately we haven't got a supply of ash this year. Caustic soda comes in 1kg plastic bags; it seems the main use for it around here is cleaning stainless steel wine making equipment. Simply add it to water, and you get lye. Add too much of it to water, and you get something more like boiling lye -- because the reaction with water is exothermic. So, with a slight error in an imperial to metric conversion somewhere along the line, we ended up with an aluminium saucepan full of a witches brew -- frothing, steaming, and getting hotter by the minute. We quickly slammed the door to the kitchen and made brief forays in to dilute the mix with more water. In the end, no harm was done -- except to our large saucepan, which has suffered some chemical etching!

If it all sounds rather nasty to you, particularly to be treating our olives with, then I tend agree. But in the end, all should be well. The point is that olives, even ripe ones, are completely inedible. Green ones have a bitterness that a few hours in lye solution takes out. After that process, they are placed in water -- which is changed daily -- for some weeks. This washes out the lye, and leaves the olives softer and less bitter. The washing then continues weekly, until finally the olives can be bottled in salt solution (and any herbs desired).

The ripe olives go through a similar process but without the lye. A week or two of daily rinsing, either in water or brine, until they become edible. They are then bottled in the same way with brine, vinegar, and flavourings of choice. We are told both should be edible after a few months...

So that's what we did with the first 20kg of olives. The rest will go for pressing into olive oil. We'll be combining our small harvest (just six trees) with the olives of friends Guido & Mariluz and Richard. Together we should be able to reach the batch size for one of the local olive presses (which open up for a few weeks at this time of year), and so end up with our very own virgin olive oil. We started the harvest this week, and I'll report on progress later...

Mixed green and black olives ready for pickling