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Brine Curing Green Olives

    Olives in water

    Olive me baby

    Olives in bowl
    Olives in bowl

    I’ve been curing olives for a few years now.

    It used to be easier when living in Toronto where it was merely a quick walk to the local fruit market to buy a bag of raw olives.  Now living in Cobble Hill on Vancouver Island it’s more complicated, as raw olives aren’t available locally.

    Fortunately for me, I was headed to Vancouver on family business last week. I called Bosa Foods, the only place I’ve found reasonably close (a mere 4 hours away by ferry and car) where one can buy them, and was told that they had just received their annual shipment of green olives (black ones will come a bit later in the season, sometime next month).

    I made sure to pick up two 10k bags, as last year the single bag I’d bought had been barely enough for our own annual use, and didn’t allow for any gifts (or product for my farm stand). To be sure of maximum freshness and quality, I began to prepare them the minute I got home.

    Soaking Olives
    Soaking Olives

    The first stage of curing involves leaching the tannins out to reduce the natural bitterness of the olive fruit, the second is brining them, either in a wet or dry cure. These instructions are for wet cure, I’ll try dry cure when I get the dark olives next month and write about that process as they progress.

    There are several pages online with instructions for how to wet cure olives, some of which suggest using lye, a caustic solution, to soften the olives prior to bringing. There are also instructions for using merely water, which struck me as wiser and which in practice, yields excellent olives.

    I’ve seen instructions for whacking them with a mallet, which I tried once, and shan’t be attempting again. Not only did the mallet recoil and almost hit me in the forehead at least twice, but the olives when cured, were bruised. Meh.

    Slicing Olives
    Slicing Olives

    The Greek method, slicing them on either side lengthwise, is perfect…but have the water bath ready to pop them into immediately, or you will have badly oxidized slashes on either side, as this happens very quickly…as I learned last year. That would have been a bigger problem if I’d had enough to give away, so I guess it was just as well that I made fewer then.

    So, all that said, this is easy peasy. Get olives, fill a jug with water (I use a party drinks dispenser with spigot, so that it’s easier to empty each day, as the water needs to be refreshed daily). Slice olives into water bath. Change water daily, after one week add brine and leave to age for a month in a loosely covered jar or crock, stirring daily if possible. Put a weight (like a plate) on the top to keep them submerged, or they will go mouldy and infect the batch.

    Olives in jars
    Olives in jars

    Use a 1:10 (10%) salt:water ratio. If you have kids and want to amuse them with science, test the density of the solution by floating an egg on top. If it floats, you have enough salt. If not, add more.

    It will be another few days before I am ready to brine the current batch, for which I’ll use seawater which has been evaporating to about 1:6 and boil it down to the required density…mainly because I live at the beach and a local salt company uses the same spot to draw from, so why not? I’ll report back when these are done to brag about how great they taste. I’ll report back when they’re ready. Maybe with a recipe for tapenade.

    Olives in water

    Brine Curing Green Olives

    Ingredients  

    Water soak

    • 10 kg raw olives green
    • 8 litre Cold Water changed daily

    Brine

    • 1 kilo Salt
    • 2 litre Boiling Water
    • 6 litre Cold Water

    Instructions 

    Water soak

    • Wash the olives to remove any road dirt.
    • Fill your soaking vessel half way with plain cool water.
    • Inspect each olive and slice the perfect ones with a sharp paring knife, and pop them immediately into water.
    • Trim the imperfect ones and pop them into a separate jar for processing.
    • Make sure when you are done that the olives are fully covered in water.change the water daily for 7 days.
    • Change the water daily for 7 days.

    Prepare brine

    • Put the salt into a stainless steel or ceramic pot large enough to hold all of the water.
    • Pour two litres of the water at boiling temperature.
    • Put on the stove and heat while stirring until the salt is fully dissolved.
    • Add the remaining 6 litres of brine water at a cold temperature to cool the brine.
    • Either store the brine until needed, or wait until it has cooled to room temperature before pouring over the olives.

    Brining the olives

    • After 7 days, drain the plain water from the olives.
    • Pour the brine over the olives. Use a plate to ensure that they are fully covered.
    • Cover with a crock lid or plastic wrap, and let sit for at least a month before eating.
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    More about olives

    5 thoughts on “Brine Curing Green Olives”

    1. So for a month I have been brining my green olives with 1/2 cup salt 1 cup vinegar and 8 cups water i didnt do the plain water now how do i can them I have changed brine everyday but do I make new brine or do I can them with the brine it’s in

      1. I’m a bit puzzled.

        If I read you correctly, it seems that you used a fresh brine every day for 30 days. Also that this brine included vinegar.

        I’m not sure what the vinegar is going to do to the flavour of the olives as it’s not a normal inclusion in my olive brine.

        I do see it in other recipes online after googling just now though, so although it strikes me as a new-world inclusion I suppose that there are people with a taste for it. After a month, the flavour will be pretty much in there, so hopefully, you’re a fan.

        The purpose of the water bath is to leach out tannins. So as long as you are changing and throwing the water out daily, plain is fine and much less costly and wasteful.

        Recipes I have read suggest a month of extraction, I like the suggestion of tannins, so do not go past 10 days of discarding water.

        To your question: I personally would suggest making a brine that was as described in the recipe, which is salt and water only, and does not include vinegar, then keep your olives in this solution…but that’s how I like my olives and does not seem to be the method you’ve followed.

        If you like the taste that the vinegar gives the olives, you should simply leave them in the current brine. Make sure of course that the olives are weighted down, so that they are completely submerged.

    2. A squeeze of lemon juice in the water that you place the olives in as you are scoring them helps prevent the slashes oxidizing and going brown.

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