Curing the Olives For a brine-cure, place the prepared olives in a mixture of 1 part salt to 10 parts water, making sure they're submerged, and leave for 3 to 6 weeks, changing the brine every week and shaking the pan once a day.
Store in a cool, dark place for six weeks before eating. The olives will keep for up to two years unopened. Once opened, store in the fridge, where they will keep for up to six months.
Pour the salted water over the olives etc until they are well covered. Seal the container. Store in a cool place and keep the container sealed for 6-8 weeks for black olives, and 8-10 weeks for green olives. Open and taste, if the olives are still bitter, leave the to cure for another week or so and test again.
To make brine, mix in 1/3 cup salt to every 1 litre of water you need. Heat up the salty water in a saucepan, and stir until all the salt has dissolved. Let the water cool for an hour or two. Then pour it over the olives, to fully cover them.
Screw the lid on the jars, and let them sit for a week to infuse the newly added flavours before sampling. Olives like this can store in a sealed jar for up 6 months in a cool dark place, or in the refrigerator for up to a year.
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. Different cultivars work best for oil or for food production.
Brine-curing is easy, but takes a long time. You make a brine of 1/4 cup kosher salt (I use Diamond Crystal) to 4 cups water, plus 1/2 cup of vinegar: white wine, cider or simple white vinegar. Submerge the olives in this brine and top with cheesecloth or something else to keep them underwater. Do not cut them.
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.
Fill the jars of olives with the brine solution and then pour in a layer of olive oil to cover the top of the jar. Seal tightly and store in a cool, dry, dark place until all the bitterness has gone. This may take anything from 6-24 months, depending on the size of the olive and how ripe it was at the time of picking.
Pick the olives when they nearly ripe, when they have begun to change colour from green to pinkish purple but are not fully black. When most of the crop have become this colour, harvest all the olives off the tree. It is best to begin the pickling process straight away.
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.
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. During these curing processes the water-soluble oleuropein compound is leached out of the olive flesh.
To make some delicious salt-cured (brined) olives, we'll need fresh olives, salt, and filtered water. (Choose unchlorinated water.) You can use any salt you like. I generally use sea salt.
Their shelf-life can be pretty impressive, lasting anywhere from 12 to 18 months once opened and properly stored in the fridge, compared to the meager three days of dry olives — like those you can snag at the salad bar. Unopened, jarred olives will stay fresh for up to two years.
The olives should be mostly submerged in brine. "That's your first clue as to whether or not they're being taken care of. This will keep them fresh and moist, and from drying out and oxidizing," Foote says. It's not a bad idea to spoon some of the brine into the container with your olives.
However, the two most common ways to store olives of any kind is brine and oil. Brine may sound intimidating, but it's just a mixture of salt and water. You need to make sure the olives are completely submerged and covered by the brine. Any that are not covered in brine are likely to go bad quicker.
Usually brine is involved for preserving, on its own or combined with vinegar. The salt in the brine, together with an acidic element such as vinegar or a slice of lemon; and a layer of oil at the very top of the bottled olives, all help in the preserving.
At this period green and black olives were cured in salt or brine and eaten both at grand Roman banquets as appetizers and by the common man as a breakfast snack with a hunk of bread.
Almost all olive cures involve some quantity of salt. Some olives are just brined; olives cured with lye are also brined; so-called "oil-cured olives" are actually heavily salted. Your only non-salted option are "oven-dried olives", a Tuscan specialty ... but they won't taste like the olives you're used to.
Another method for curing olives that has been lost to time was the ancient technique applied to green olives, which were soaked in sea water in order that their bitterness leach out, then kept in clay jugs filled with wine must.
Olives are frequently harvested at night as the cooler temperatures preserve their aromatic flavors.