Here in Itri, Italy we live among the olive groves, in the months since we have moved here we have walked amongst the groves and enjoyed the suns golden rays between the branches at sunset. The olive trees are beautiful with their silver grey leaves and gnarled trunks.
We walked among the trees in the cool hours of summer evenings and gave them barely a glance when we were picking figs from the fig trees nestled among them. Summer turned to fall and the temperatures dropped and I started to wonder when the olives would be ready for harvest. I asked around and locals told me it would be October or November for the olive harvest.
I don’t quite know what I imagined would happen, did I imagine when it was time for the olive harvest I would be invited to join in the joy of harvest? Would a little “ape” ( small truck on the frame of a motorcycle used locally in the olive groves) come driving by with all of my neighbors and friends hanging off the side with big smiles on their faces and wicker baskets in their hands? Would the women have their hair tied up in red bandannas with denim sleeves rolled up ready for work? Did I imagine we would all joyfully harvest the olives then process them into the liquid gold of olive oil?
Clearly I watch too many movies. None of the sort happened. In fact, one day in mid October I went out to inspect the olive trees in my yard and in the adjacent groves and found there weren’t any olives left! What had happened? Had they harvested the olives while we were gone for the day? That seemed unlikely.
Come to find out, olive trees only produce olives every two years. This is because the trees are producing the new crop of olives at the same time the old crop is being harvested. So all of the energy of the tree goes to the ripe olives and this adversely affects the new crop. Thus, the second year after a harvest can be minimal. I think that is what happened in my olive grove. It simply was not the right year for a good harvest. But there were still a few olives on the branches.
So I carried my own little wicker basket outside and began to pick the few olives that were left on the trees. A few here and a few there. I felt like Rachel or Rahab in the bible times, gleaning the empty fields after harvest. But it was beautiful work. The sun was shining and the few olives on the branches were plump and yellow-green in color. Some even had the tint of purple starting. I plucked and plucked and dreamed of the olives I would make.
So, no one showed me how to harvest and there was no big festive harvest with friends and family. No one showed me how to process them in an intimate rustic kitchen. I was alone …with…Google. Thankfully there are websites for that. So I read and read until I felt confident to conquer the elusive olive.
Why has olive production become so elusive to us? Back home in California I lived in communities that were landscaped with olive trees. I remember seeing the black olives drop to the ground feeling baffled about how on earth we eat them? Certainly it is only possible when you buy olives in a can or jar. I heard crazy stories of chemicals and leaching and lye, poisonous water deadly to the environment and a bitterness that would scare anyone straight.
I had a few acquaintances from the Middle East who wanted to harvest the landscaped olives and seemed to think it was not a big problem. But I still felt like it must be an impossible process.
I asked around a few Italians I knew, it seemed that at every Italians home, they had a dish of olives that their mom or nonna had made. Yet it seemed it involved months or years of storage time. Finally someone mentioned you could smash the olives and that would reduce the amount of time needed before you could eat them. That was encouraging to me, after all, we were not sure we would be living in Italy another 6 months, I didn’t want to start a batch of olives that I could never eat!
One day a friend gave me a “bottle” of olives she had made the previous year. Yes, it was a plastic water bottle with the little lid on top. The opening on the top was barely big enough for an olive to fit through. She said “just cut the top off when you pour it into another container”, actually, she didn’t say that in English, she said it in Italian and made the motion and sound effects for cutting off the top of the bottle. I got the point and went home and cut the top of the water bottle off by first stabbing it with a knife, then cutting the top off with kitchen sizzers. It worked perfectly and they were delicious “kalamata” style olives that had sat in her pantry for a year. This helped me to get the idea that it doesn’t have to be a big crazy production, just cram some olives into a water bottle, add a little salt water and call it done.
So that’s what I did after a little help from someone’s blog. I sat at the wooden table outside armed with a mallet and some water bottles and smashed each little olive with a solid “whack!” Before plucking it into the water bottle. Once I had filled several water bottles with olives I added plain water to the bottle and set them on my counter.
For these crushed olives I will need to change the water every day for a week. Because the olive has been crushed it will penetrate down to the pit faster and remove the bitterness from the olive. Olives are INCREDIBLY bitter, so bitter that no one would EVER eat them. I don’t even know how people figured out how to eat them, they are so bitter. They need to be categorized along with artichokes, how on earth did people say “Let’s eat this!”?!? They must have been desperate.
Actually there is a story about this in the Iliad, that ancient story we were all supposed to study in school along with Homers Odyssey. Apparently a character from the story plucks an olive out of the Mediterranean Sea and eats it. It’s delicious, of course, because it had been brining in the salty sea for months! So that’s the idea, olives just need to sit on salt water for months, even years to remove the bitterness. So thats what I did, brine the olives in a salt water….in water bottles. But if you want to eat the olives soon, like in the next few months, you need to crush them to allow the salty brine to penetrate rapidly to the pit, the source of the bitterness.
So one sunny October afternoon I whacked olives until my heart was content and filled water bottles full of their little broken and bruised bodies. Then I sat the bottles on my counter top in the kitchen. Each morning when I woke up and started my coffee pot, I would drain my plastic water bottles containing whacked olives and refill the bottles with fresh water. This continued for two weeks. The instructions said one week but the olives tasted too bitter at the end of one week so we did another for good measure. After I felt the olives weren’t too bitter I drained them of fresh water for their last time and prepared a brine of salt and water and poured it over the top of the olives. They would now be left to sit until I was ready to eat them.
Well, I was ready to eat them right away. So I let them sit in salt water for another week and then drained the olives into a large pickle jar, added a coating of olive oil and topped the crushed olives with fresh garlic, dried red pepper flakes and fennel seeds. They would sit in their little olive oil bath until we were ready to eat them. Which was every night from then until now and will continue every night for the rest of my life…if I’m fortunate enough to live by an olive tree.
They are so good! The first batch was a little bitter, but I was told that Italians like that bitter taste, so I summoned my inner Italian and decided to like it too. These little olives just get better and better, I am loving the fact that now I know how to make olives! It’s really not that hard, in fact if you can wait 6 months it’s no work at all accept to pluck the olives into a water bottle and fill the bottle with a salt water solution and store for 6 months. If you want to eat them in three weeks you need to whack them first, and change their water every 10 days to 2 weeks then fill the water bottles with salt water and store.
I wrote this article 3 weeks after the initial olive “whacking” episode and after changing the water everyday and after the initial tasting just to be sure it all turned out correctly. I am happy to report it did turn out! In fact, it is now mid November and it is still olive harvest time. Now the olives have turned deep purple, even black. I have watched my neighbors and everyone in my territory harvest their olives.
They don’t drive a “ape” full of smiling people wearing red bandannas and carrying wicker baskets, but they do harvest the olives. An elderly couple, a single older man, a few young workers are the ones who are doing the job. They always spread a green net on the ground under the olive tree and they use a power tool that looks like a rake that viberates rapidly in the branches to knock the olive down to the net below. They harvest in a small scale operation, the old fashioned way. They carry their golden green globes to the “frantoia” (olive crusher) and collect the liquid gold that pours out in the form of olive oil. Yes, sometimes they carry the produce in an “ape” vehicle, but not in the same romantic fashion I imagined.
Some Italian friends came to my house for dinner one night and they saw all of my “water bottles” full of olives on my counter and they nodded at me with full Italian pride. Another guest asked “oh, did they show you how to make olives?” And the Italian friend answered, “no, she figured it out by herself”. Yep, where there is a will, there is a way. The Homestead Traveler way.
Mediterranean Style Cracked Green Olives
(water based, change water every day for 2 weeks, brine 1 week (takes 3 weeks total)
Ingredients
- 5 pounds olives (2.27 kilo)
- 3/4 cup salt
- 8 cups water
- 1 cup white vinegar
Instructions
Place the cracked olives into large plastic water bottles and cover olives with fresh, cool water. Close the container lid loosely and leave the olives to soak.
After 24 hours, drain the olives and cover again with fresh, cool water. Repeat the water change daily for 1 – 2 weeks to reach the desired level of de-bittering. If you want less-bitter olives, continue to soak for two weeks and change water daily.
Prepare the finish brine—add 1 pound (1 1⁄2 cups) of pickling salt to 1 gallon of cool water, stir to dissolve, and add 2 cups of white vinegar.
Drain the de-bittered olives and cover with the finish brine.
When you are ready to use, drain the olives if the brine, toss in olive oil, fennel seeds, dried red pepper flakes and fresh chopped garlic. Store in refridgerator as you are eating them, they only get better as you go along!
For long term storage you don’t have to smash the olives, just place the whole olive in the salt water vinegar brine in water bottles and store in a cabinet for 6 months or longer,
Tip: lids should be loosely only top, not tightened to allow the liquid to bubble up, this is part of the fermentation process and we all know how good fermentation is for us! After several months you can tighten the lids. You may need to make new brine to top off the bottles if there was water loss during this process. Also, DON’T use wide mouth jars for the olives that will bring for 6 months, they will develop mold on the surface. Instead use plastic water bottles with a small opening. I learned the hard way that I should have known to follow the Italian example…
