Gadenin日本語Get the appA raw olive is not edible, and that is normal
Every gardener who grows olives for the first time bites one off the tree and spits it out. The bitterness comes from oleuropein, a compound present in the flesh at every stage of ripeness. It does not fade as the fruit ripens, and there is no point on the tree at which an olive becomes pleasant to eat straight off the branch.
Curing is what removes it. Water, brine or lye draws the compound out of the flesh over a period of weeks or months. Until you have done that, a bowl of home-grown olives is decorative and nothing else. Plan the curing before you plan the picking, because a picked olive left in a bowl will bruise and spoil within a couple of days.
Green, turning or black: pick for what you want to make
Ripeness on an olive tree is a color sequence, not a date. The fruit goes hard green, then straw yellow-green, then a mottled purple, then a soft blackish purple. All four stages are usable and each behaves differently once cured, so decide first and pick to match.
Green olives are firm and take the longest to cure but hold their texture best. Fully black olives cure faster and taste milder, but bruise so easily that they have to be handled a few at a time and cured within a day of picking.
| Stage | Skin color | Firmness | Best for | Curing time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Green | Hard, grass green | Very firm | Crisp table olives | 8 to 12 weeks in brine |
| Turning | Straw to rose | Firm | Balanced flavor and texture | 6 to 10 weeks |
| Mottled | Purple patches | Yielding | Softer table olives | 4 to 8 weeks |
| Black | Even blackish purple | Soft | Rich, mild olives; oil | 3 to 6 weeks, or dry salt |
Do not mix stages in one jar. Green and black olives cure at different rates, and a mixed batch ends up with some pieces still bitter while others have gone mushy.
Picking without ruining the fruit
Bruised olives turn brown at the bruise during curing and stay soft there. Handle fruit as you would ripe plums rather than as you would nuts, and never shake a garden tree onto a hard surface.
For a small garden tree, hand picking is quick enough and gives the best result. Take the fruit off with a slight twist rather than a pull, so you do not strip the short spur the fruit was hanging from.
- Pick into a shallow container A deep bucket crushes the fruit at the bottom under its own weight. Use trays or shallow boxes no more than four inches (10 cm) deep.
- Lay a sheet under the tree A sheet catches what you drop and saves you sorting fruit out of the soil. Fruit that has hit bare ground is best left; it picks up soil organisms that spoil a curing batch.
- Work in the cool of the morning Fruit picked in the heat of the afternoon softens fast and starts to ferment before you get it into water.
- Sort the same day Throw out anything with a puncture, a soft brown patch or a small exit hole. One damaged fruit will cloud and sour a whole jar.
- Get them into water within a day If you cannot start the cure immediately, cover the fruit completely with cold water and keep it somewhere cool. That holds them for two or three days.
The simplest cure: water, then brine
There are several curing methods, and the one that needs no special chemicals is the water cure followed by a storage brine. It takes longer than a lye cure but nothing can go badly wrong, and the flavor is better.
Slit or lightly crack each olive first so the water can get at the flesh. Then cover them completely with cold water, keeping them submerged with a plate or a bag of water, and change the water every day. After several weeks, taste one. When the bitterness has dropped to something you would happily eat, move the fruit into a salt brine of about one part salt to ten parts water for storage, and keep it somewhere cool and dark.
Always keep the fruit fully under the liquid. Any olive floating in the air at the top of the jar will mold, and the mold spreads through the batch.
How much to expect, and what to record
A young container olive may give you a handful in its first fruiting year. A tree in the ground that has been growing for six to eight years can produce several pounds, and a mature garden tree far more, but the yield swings from one year to the next because olives naturally alternate between heavy and light crops.
Write down the picking date, the stage you picked at, the weight, and how many weeks the cure took before the fruit tasted right. That last figure is the one you will want next year, because it depends on your own fruit size and your own water, not on any published table.