What To Do With Olives

Picking Olives is something I do every year, but what about when you dont have a press to make oil, what then do you do with these things.  Here is my recipe for curing olives, the natural way.  When olives are cured in masses, chemicals are used to speed up the lengthy process, and the ones you will make will taste way better and will only require water and salt.

Olive picking and preserving has been a passion of mine for years, the amount of money I would have spent on olives if I didnt make them is a scarey thought, but its not just because of the money that I choose to do this preserving, its because the home made olives I make are like nothing I have ever been able to purchase. You can taste the simlicity, nothing but salt and water. The secret to preserving olives is putting salt in to draw out the bitterness but then drawing the salt back out also. After much experimenting and many jars of olives that ended up leaving your tongue numb from too much salt I have learnt to use the brine, then a stronger brine and then plain water before being packed into brine in jars. Sounds complicated but so simple seeing as you only change brines every three days, not a bad commitment to make. The most time consuming task is picking your olives, you may have a rake and a net which would be perfect but I pick by hand into a picking bib usually standing on the bonnet and roof of my truck trying to reach as many olives as possible.

The trees I choose to pick from are very old and there seem to be three in our village, its thought that early Yougoslav settlers brought them here so that dates them to about 150 years old. However old they are, they are the hugest olive trees I have ever seen and I even picked olives in Italy so have seen a few old trees. The height of these wild trees with their drooping branches is a frustrating sight for an eager woman standing on her truck, but I have to remember our small feathered friends who adore this fruit also, so we can go halves, I will take the lower half, they can have the top. How do we know when to pick olives, I check them about every second week from February. When the odd olive is going puple on its way to black, I will use this as a sign to get my things together because in a week I will pick. Two years ago I picked in May and this year March, so trust your sight more than anything. You want a decent sized olive but if you wait too long after they start to turn black\\purple you will have a tree raided by birds. After picking I spend alot of time sitting down and sorting, you will no doubt have leaves and bird pecked or damaged olives, I also snap off any stalks left attached. You can seperate the black from the green in you want to, the black will cure faster but its not a problem to mix them. Place your olives in a bin with a lid, bucket if small harvest or bowl if even smaller, its best to weigh them down so they are all submerged, in a bucket I use a plate and in the bin I use a piece of plastic with holes which I made especially to fit. If olives are left to float uneven curing will happen as the same side will always float and you will have odd colouring where they have touched the air. When changing the brine you will notice the water has become a yellow colour and sometimes has scum floating on the top. This is all very normal and in fact perfect!\par