Home Cured Olives

Moon after midnight so bright it casts long shadows before me; it makes silver leaf undersides gleam like jewelry in the gentle breeze.  Gnarled trees, who knows how many centuries old they are, stand bravely in the moonlight on the Málaga hillside.  Olive trees have such longevity that one can legitimately imagine that these trees saw marching Roman legions or marauding Moors.  I trudge up the road to my little place, past my friends' house with its large yard and their own olive and almond trees.

I loved looking at the ancient olive trees, thinking about the millennia that human beings have been eating olives and using olive oil for food and other purposes.  King David said in the Psalm that God gives man wine to gladden the heart and olive oil to make his face shine.  Roman soldiers carried olives and olive oil in their knapsacks.  Lope de Rueda wrote one of his funniest plays about parent-child disagreements about an imagined olive grove a generation before Cervantes began writing.  Today we eat olives from ancient trees and from relatively young ones. 

More than thirty years ago, I spent a lot of time with a family in Málaga, Spain that had an almond tree and an olive tree in their garden and was lucky enough to learn what to do with the freshly harvested almonds and olives.  Neither olives nor almonds can be eaten directly off the tree.  They are too bitter.  Even the ones that have ripened to black are hard and inedible.  (I know you know that green and black olives are immature and ripe ones from the same tree.)  They take a long brining process to reach edibility.  You have to wonder why the first human beings who ate them ever wanted to or thought they would be good!

Margarita's large kitchen had a typical Spanish quarry tile floor that was always cool under the feet, even in the hottest summer weather, and whitewashed plaster walls.  I remember a winter visit when the floor along one wall was lined with large clay pots from which she scraped a layer of mold every day.  They contained the season's harvest of olives curing away until they no longer needed her attention and could be stored in the pantry.  I remember late morning coffee breaks taken with Margarita and her housekeeper; we stirred sweetened condensed milk into our cups of strong Spanish coffee and chatted.  The conversations frequently revolved around food and cooking.  I learned a lot from those women, including how to brine and cure olives and make them fit to eat and enjoy. 

The first step is to make the olives ready to absorb the brine and release their bitterness.  You can put them in your bathtub and lay a board over them then jump on the board to crack the olives.  You can crack a smaller number with a meat pounder.  You might slit them with a knife, too, but that causes discoloration around the cut.

Next, put the cracked olives into a large container of water.  If your tap water is the heavily chlorinated city sort, you might prefer to use gallon jugs of spring water.  Change the water once a day for four days; it draws out the bitterness.  The first couple of days the water turns a rather nasty brown and gets something scummy in it.  It is important not to let the olives have any contact with the air; they turn brown fast, the way apples and avocados do, so you need to cover the container with a plate to hold them down.

After changing the water every day for four days, break into an olive and taste it.  If the bitterness is gone, make a 10% brine solution and soak the olives for another four days.  Drain off the brine.  Now is the time to make your own cure and let them sit in it for at least two weeks before you start to eat them.  My husband and I used to have to control ourselves mightily and make the olives sit a month, not just two weeks until we broke into them.  The longer they sit, the better they taste.

Málaga Style Cured Olives

20 lbs./9kg olives prepared as described above
20 lemons, thoroughly scrubbed to remove all wax and sliced thin
1 fat fistful of fresh rosemary sprigs
1 fat fistful of fresh thyme sprigs
10 heads garlic, broken into cloves, peeled and cracked
Enough 5% brine solution to cover (about 6 gallons/20 litres)

Use glass jars with clamp-on glass lids and rubber rings.  Run them through the dishwasher or boil them and used them hot.  Layer the ingredients in them in alternating layers to fill.  Boil brine solution and pour on to cover.  Leave in a cool, dark place to cure for two to four weeks before eating. 

They remain good for as long as four years, I have found; the flavor deepens.  You may want to rinse off the brine before you eat them.  You will also enjoy eating the pickled garlic cloves and lemon slices. 

To make them mellower, after at least a month (or two) in the brine, you can strain the brine off the olives and pat them dry.  Put them in a freshly washed (in the dishwasher, or boiled) jar with olive oil.  Pour in a layer of olive oil then add the olives, lemon slices, garlic and herbs in a pretty arrangement, then fill the jar with more olive oil.  Let sit a month before eating.  When the jar is empty, the oil makes a tasty vinaigrette for salads, or you can mix it with grated aged manchego cheese to toss with pasta. 

For presents, tie pretty ribbons around the necks of the jars.    If you can get your hands on actual olive branches with leaves, tie them into the bows. 


(This is a rewrite of an article I wrote a few months ago.  Please critique.)