[/caption][caption id="attachment_186" align="alignright" width="300" caption="The harvest"]
[/caption]It's kind of like the Manhattan Project, only different. Although, if I made them into martini olives then it could be the Martini Project, because I much prefer martinis to manhattans. But I digress.
I feel like Martha Stewart Ingalls Wilder. That is, I'm "putting food by," but the food in question is olives, hence the Martha Stewart vibe. And the olives in question are home grown, so you see where I'm coming from. On February 13, I picked a couple of jars worth of olives from our tree. I don't know what kind they are--if they end up tasting good I'll look into it.
I found directions in Hobby Farm Home Magazine on how to cure olives in water. There is a way to cure olives in lye, but that seemed outside my skill set. Lye-curing involves protective clothing and the possibility of severe injury if not done correctly. Didn't seem fun. So anyway, the directions said to put the olives in ordinary water to cover, seal them in a jar, and then rinse the olives and change the water every day for 40 days (it's all very biblical, isn't it--olives, 40 days, washing in water...). So I did that. On March 20, just about 40 days later, I tasted the olives. They were incredibly bitter still and, basically, nasty. So back in the water they went.
The process of soaking is interesting. The black color leaches out of the olives with every water change, and they become more and more purpley-mauve in color. Also, right at the beginning, the olives must let off some sort of gas, because every day when I'd open the jar to change the water, they would fizz and sizzle like they were carbonated, to the point where you could see the little bubbles in the air, like a freshly poured class of 7-up. Each day the fizzing would grow a bit less pronounced, until they pretty much stopped fizzing altogether. Day 38 shows the beautiful color of the semi-cured olives.
[caption id="attachment_193" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Day 38"]
[/caption]Around this time, however, disaster struck. Well, that's a bit strong. Let's say a nuisance occurred. I lost the directions! And Hobby Farm Home didn't have them on their website! I knew I had to do something with oil and salt at this point, but what? After poking around a bit online, I found the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources Publication 8267, which tells how to water-cure both Kalamata style olives (black) and Mediterranean-style (green). Since I'd already started, I went with Kalamata-style. Unfortunately, my original directions didn't mention cracking or slitting the olives, presumably to help the pits leach out the bitterness, which is apparently quite important. Oh well, next time.
On March 26, I put them in a mixture of brine (made with pickling salt), red wine vinegar, and olive oil, where they were to rest in a cool, dark place for a month. They sat in my pantry until today, April 18. Now I know it's six days short of a month, but I am impatient. I had to try them! Well, I am very pleasantly surprised. There is still a little bitterness, but it is very minimal, and I'm sure over the next week or two that residual bitterness will dissipate. There I was, at 7:30 this morning, eating olives (and believe me, I'm not a pizza-for-breakfast kind of gal)! But I'm pretty proud of myself. They'll keep in the fridge for up to a year. I only did two jars this year in case they weren't worth the trouble. But it really wasn't much trouble, and it was a fun little project.
I now have two jars of quite official looking olives in my fridge, rubbing shoulders with the pepperoncini and the Tapatio, just as if they were store-bought! So if you get a jar of olives from me for Christmas, act surprised.
[caption id="attachment_196" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Ta-daah!"]
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