Curing Olives - Tips and Tricks

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As much as gardening enthusiasts enjoy the process of nurturing, the fruit of their labor is an incentive that keeps driving them. Planting an olive tree too comes with a similar incentive of curing olives.

However, before you start enjoy the fruit, curing olives is essential. This includes plucking olives at the right time with the right method and preparing them to be consumed. Let's take these things one at a time-

The right time for the harvest- Olives usually start ripening in fall. The fruits are green when fresh and turn bluish black when they ripen. The following are the main stages of olive ripening-

Stage 0-Olives are dark green
Stage 1-The fruit turns yellow or yellowish-green
Stage 2-The skin color turns yellowish and reddish spots appear on them
Stage 3-The color of the fruit turn reddish or light violet
Stage 4- At this stage olives turn black on the outside the while the flesh inside becomes green.
Stage 5-Olives turn black and the inner flesh is turns a little violet
Stage 6- Olives turn black skin color while the inner flesh becomes completely violet.
Stage 7-Olives turn black skin and the inner flesh turns completely dark

The best time for olive harvesting depends on the end use you want to put olives to and what you prefer quality or quantity. For example, harvesting before stage 3 will help you get excellent quality olive oil and doing it post stage 6 will get you huge quantities of oil! For table consumption olives should be plucked when green.

The right way to harvest- You can choose between manual and mechanical harvesting when it comes to plucking olives. While hand harvested olives can be consumed as table fruits and/or pickles, mechanically harvested olives are ideal for olive oil production.

Curing olives for consumption- One thing that you must know is that you can't just pluck olives off a tree and eat them! Fresh olives usually taste bitter and are un-edible, they need to be picked before they can be consumed. The pickling process not only makes the olives taste good but also helps in removing impurities from the harvested fruit.

Curing olives through pickling can take between 10 days to seven weeks (depending upon the method). The simplest way to pickle them involves the use of brine, vinegar and water and takes around 10 days. Here's how it works-

When curing olives, you can start by making two cuts along each side of the fruit; wash the olives first in running water and then pour boiling hot water over them. Let them soak for 24 hours. Repeat the process twice, drain the water and place the fruits in a clean jar. Now pour a mixture of 3 parts brine and one part white vinegar in the jar, add a layer of olive oil and let the olives pickle. You can consume the fruit after letting it rest in the jar for at least a week.

Other curing olives techniques include pickling olives with spices and/or by using water, lye solution and salt.