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Olives, curing - an old post from the archives

There have been inquiries about how to cure olives - I thought I had
something somewhere which described this in great detail, but I am
not finding it at the moment.  But I did come across an old posting
in the Medit-Plants archives (which I keep) on this topic:

Sean O.

====================================================================
From: Alisdair <71154.2637@CompuServe.COM>
Subject: Olives in UK
Sender: owner-medit-plants@ucdavis.edu
Date: 31 Jul 96 04:15:19 EDT

Paul Christian asked about olives.

When we had a garden in South London (not anything like as far
North) we plante an olive in a relatively open site.  It grew well
for the dozen years or so we were there, surviving moderate winter
frosts with only light damage to young unripened shoot tips.  For all
I know it's still flourishing (there is a pair of trees about a
century old in the more favoured Chelsea Physic Garden in London).
>From a very early age it set fruit every year.  However as Paul
probably knows the fruits don't ripen until late in the year
(typically late November for us, sometimes even December).  This
meant that unless the late summer and autumn wer relatively warm the
fruits were still trying to plump up in the colder weather so didn't
show well by the time they were ripe.  So we had what I'd call good
fruits only twice.

The next problem is that you can't eat olives without curing them
(though in olive-growing areas in Greece the local people do eat the
very ripest fresh fruits at harvest as a local delicacy).  They are
intensely bitter.  We found the simplest (!) method was the
traditional one of steeping the fruits for ten days in a very
alkaline lye (we used soaked wood ashes topped up with a little
alkaline-type bleach or chloro) , then washing them thoroughly, then
soaking them in brine for three days, washing them, another
three-day brine bath, then wash, then a third week-long bath, then a
wash, then storing them in a weak brine solution or (cheating!) in
olive oil.  This is more or less the Kalamata process, which retains
the olive flavour well but still leaves a bit of bitterness.  You can
prick the olives first, with a needle in several places, which gets
the lye working better.

Good luck Paul - and anyone else who tries! I know a bit about
pruning olives for fruiting in warm climates, incidentally, as I now
have a few old trees in a Greek garden, so can give some advice if
anyone wants it.

Alisdair Aird
Sussex, UK
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