Olives are harvested both by-hand and mechanically. Harvested olives may be milled to make oil or cured for food production. Olives cannot be consumed direct from the tree; they are too bitter without curing. The raw fruit is bursting with oleuropein, a bitter compound that must be removed prior to eating.
Are olives edible off the branch? While olives are edible straight from the tree, they are intensely bitter. Olives contain oleuropein and phenolic compounds, which must be removed or, at least, reduced to make the olive palatable.
Olives picked off the tree contain a very bitter compound called oleuropein. Harvested olives must be “cured” to remove the bitterness in order to make them palatable. The most common curing processes use brine, dry salt, water, or lye treatments.
Olives are inedible before they are cured. Many people don't know that olives are actually inedible when they are first picked. Raw olives straight from the tree contain oleuropein, an extremely bitter compound that makes olives completely unpalatable. This is why, for many years, olives weren't eaten at all!
Olives need to be pickled following their harvest. Pick the olives when they nearly ripe, when they have begun to change colour from green to pinkish purple but are not fully black.
You can make a simple brine solution using a ratio of 1 parts salt to 10 parts water. Use an unprocessed salt such as rock salt or sea salt. Cover the olives with the brine in a bucket, jar or container with a lid. Make sure the olives are again completely submerged.
Combine 1 part salt to 10 parts water and pour over the olives in a bowl or pot. Weigh them down with a plate and let sit for 1 week. Drain the olives and repeat the brining process for another week. Do this two more times so they brine for about a month or so.
According to the American Chemical Society (ACS), fresh olives contain an overwhelmingly bitter compound called oleuropein. This substance renders the stone fruit "absolutely disgusting" when eaten raw. While fresh olives are generally considered to be inedible, consuming one raw won't actually cause any harm.
Raw olives are incredibly bitter, so once harvested they are cured and then usually preserved in salt or brine. The small, oval olive fruit has a flavour ranging from salty to mild and sweet.
All olives start green on the tree and turn black as they ripen. The earlier the pick the firmer the olive will be when you eat it. Greener olives will usually have lighter nuttier flavor to black. Some varieties are best picked green, others black.
Though olives are perfectly fine to consume straight from the jar, we recommend that you rinse them under cool water before serving. This removes most of the brine and sodium that coat the olive and can take away from the actual flavor. If you are watching your sodium intake rinsing is a must.
How long does it take to cure olives? The whole process takes about 10 days. At this point, you can keep in the crock or transfer to smaller jars. After filling all the jars, pour another cold salt water brine over the olives and place them in the fridge.
Olives are a strange food: a fruit that you can't buy fresh, just swimming in salty brine. Why? They contain a bitter chemical called oleuropein. This week on Reactions, we're talking about the science of how we can eat this unique stone fruit.
The lye that penetrated through the olive to cure it will have reacted with the acids in the olive. The extra lye from the curing solution gets rinsed off of them after the olives are cured and then the olives usually get soaked in brine to finish the cure and to store them.
Moderation is key
Though olives may aid weight loss, they're high in salt and fat — and eating too many of them may offset your weight loss success. As such, you should moderate your intake, limiting yourself to a few ounces at most per day.
Sterilise jars and recycled bottles
Rinse with fresh water and place glass jars/bottles on a tray and pop them into the oven at 120°C for 10 minutes until jars/bottles are completely dry. Wait for jars/bottles to cool before handling them or use tongs when taking them out of the oven.
Simply place your olives on a flat work surface and use a chef's knife or meat pounder to gently squish (or, if you're more confident, aggressively smash) the olive. You'll cleave the pit from the skin so that even if it's not immediately revealed, it will be very easy to nudge out.
In order for spraying to be effective, olive trees must be sprayed annually, in the first quarter of the year, and well before the flowers begin blooming in late spring and early summer.
Once picked, olives have a short shelf life (no more than three days). So the couple of days before the press is when ALL the picking needs to happen.
Olives are a staple at many social gatherings and a common pre-dinner snack at Spanish tapas restaurants and bars. When soaked in citrusy olive oil or tossed in herbs, they make a rewarding nosh, but how to handle the pits? Olive fanatics will be the first to say that olives with the pits intact have more flavor.
Raw olives are far too bitter to eat, and can only be enjoyed after they are processed, usually by curing or pickling them. Most olives are made into olive oil, but some olives are preserved to be enjoyed in meals, especially in Mediterranean cuisine.
You can store them in an unopened bottle or jar in your kitchen, without placing them into the fridge. You need to make sure they are in a dry and cool place out of direct sunlight, (like the pantry) as the sunlight can cause olives to deteriorate faster.