An Adventure in Olive Picking and Curing
Three years ago, while at the farmer’s market, my wife saw something unusual: uncured olives. We had never seen them at the farmer’s market before or since, and her buying them kicked off a chain of events that brings us to today where we have 14 lbs of cured olives and 2 gallons of olive oil.
The First Time Picking
The first time we picked, we hand picked for two hours and ended up with 15 lbs of good olives. Curing went well, and we ate olives and olive bread for a few more months.
The next two years were bad seasons. There were few olives, and we didn’t pick. We almost threw away the buckets we used to cure them.
Welcome 2019, a Good Season
The trees were full. Unfortunately, my friend had cancer. He had been going through treatment all year, and the treatment was working. However, he didn’t have the energy to pick, but he invited us to pick if I wanted. He didn’t want the fruit to go to waste.
Saturday morning came, and I drove down to Watsonville. I picked for two hours, and he helped wash them. I picked using my hands, a rake, and a pole. I settled on the most common way to pick olives: beating the tree. It feels unnatural, like you are shaking the tree down for money. There are shaker machines, but we just had a metal pole. So as the tree gave me her olives on the mats underneath, I vigorously beat up on the branches.
Three trees later, and I was done. I had close to 140 lbs of olives. I drove home, and my wife helped me sort through the olives. We were pulling out the best olives for curing. The rest were going to the press to make oil.
The end of this game was a single bucket with 14 lbs of olives, beautiful amazing, olives, and 110 lbs for oil. Also, there was a mess outside my garage of leaves and dirt.
The next day, I left at 7am to get to the olive press in Livermore, the Olivina. They have an olive orchard, and one day a year, they do a community pressing. Drop off in the morning, pick up in the afternoon.
We went back at night to pick up the oil. It’s hard to estimate how much oil will come out of how many olives. We were expecting between 1 and 2 gallons. We got 2 gallons of amazing oil.
We tried it when we got home with some bread. It was so rich with a bite. It was slightly bitter, and it was certainly not like any olive oil we had tasted before.
Here is a comparison in color:
Lye Curing
One can not eat raw olives, unless they like something extremely bitter. You must cure them. We cured some with lye and some with water. For lye, we put 2 tablespoons in 1 gallon of water, and it took 24 hours. We have also used 4 table spoons in 1 gallon which took 12 hours. The key is to make sure to start rinsing the lye out right when it hits the seed otherwise, it will ruin the fruit as I did earlier in the year with some other olives.
Here is how I knew the lye got to the seed. The first two images were olives cut before the lye had gone all the way. You can see a slight discoloration just beneath the skin. The bottom two show that change in color had gone all the way to the seed.
Then I rinsed. First, I poured out the lye mixture, and I rinsed them twice by filling up the bucket and pouring it back out immediately. Then I filled up the bucket and let it sit for an hour. I rinsed it again, and once more before I went to work. Each rinse allows the lye to get into that water. You can feel it in the water; after the first few rinses, if you touch the water or olives, they will feel soapy.
Then I rinsed them twice a day until I didn’t feel that anymore, and I would try eating them. If they didn’t taste like soap, they were ready. I put in a cup of salt and some apple cider vinegar, let them sit, and then we ate them. Delicious. I keep them in the frig. The only thing I messed up was that I didn’t make sure the salt was dissolved in the water before pouring the water in because some olives at the bottom were saltier than others.
Water Curing
We also water cured 7 lbs of olives. To do this, we used a pitter to take out the seed, and then using our hands, we pulled off any remaining fruit attached to the seed.
The only downside is that we didn’t use gloves, and our hands got ruined. It took a week for the stains to come out. Our hands looked like dirt.
Then we rinsed the olives, twice a day for a week or a little more. Once their taste got good, and the water was mostly clear, I put half in a brine and half in oil. The brine was the same as before. For the oil ones, it was oil, salt, and garlic.
Cured olives below:
Visually, what the two solutions look like:
Now, we have olives to eat and bake with. Olives for pizza, olives for bread, too many olives. We really enjoy them, and curing olives goes with making our own pasta, tomato sauce, and coffee.
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Further readings of mine:
Staccato Espresso: Leveling Up Espresso
Learning how to drive in my 30's
How to run a marathon without training
LEGO’s: Stories of Destruction
