Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Green Olives - DIY

I thought I would post about the olives I make every year when you find them raw in fruit shops. After buying 6 kilos of raw green olives from Woolies in Chullora, I found myself wondering what the heck to do with them. I looked at recipes online and made my own version based on the good bits of maybe 10 recipes... Hope this works for you as well as it has for me. You need 2 Plastic buckets- I use two office paper bins, that have been sterilized by pouring boiling water on the inside. Then you wash the olives well, discarding any with imperfections. You make a vertical cut in each olive, from stem to the base and as deep as the pit. Fill the buckets 2/3 way with water, and in that dissolve 2 cups or so of sea salt. Divide the olives in these containers. With a large plate, face down, push this on the top of the olives until they are all submerged to the bottom with about 2-3 inches of the brine on top. Every night for the next 14 days you have to Pour out all the water, (holding the plate while tipping out the liquid) rinse them with fresh water, then fill again and stir in the 2 cups of salt. Do NOT attempt to eat any untill at least day 12- and even then it will be very bitter. While they ferment, there will be variations in colour and some residue will form on the surface. If when you press the olives and they are really squishy in some areas, these have gone rotten. Check to make sure others havent rotted in the same way- if they have then you must throw the whole thing away. They will get softer, but not disintigrating. When day 14 rolls around, put the olives into jars after rinsing, with no liquid. Then make a brine with 1:1 water to white vinegar, and some salt dissolved in. Boil this and pour into the sterilized jars. The longer you leave this the better they will be! I suggest waiting a minimum of 3 months.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The more I look the more different ways I find to cure olives. We pickle our green olives quite differently... but I must give your method a try next autumn.

snaplings said...

absolutely. There are dozens of methods- some more questionable than others- but I found this one worked for me. best of luck next autumn!

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