To cure olives quickly, you need to break the skin (crush or slash) and use a vigorous water-soak/brine method, changing water daily for 1-2 weeks to leach bitterness, then moving to a salt brine for a shorter period (weeks instead of months) to finish, adding vinegar and herbs for flavor as they sit in the brine for a few more weeks to months, tasting frequently. Faster methods involve cracking them open to speed up the bitterness removal, but speed always depends on the olive type and desired taste.
Submerge the olives with brine. Weight the top with a plate, or seal tightly depending on your vessel, to ensure they're covered. Leave for one year or until your happy enough tannin has been removed to your taste. If you can't wait a year, simply cut or smash the olives before adding brine to speed up the process.
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.
If you have slit or crushed your olives, they will only need to sit in brine for 3-6 weeks depending on taste. If you have left them whole they can sit in brine for up to 6 months or longer. How often you change the brine is dependant on your environment and how quickly they cure.
You can do this by curing them in water and changing it daily, or by brining them, or dry salting them, or salt and then smoke them… so many options!
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.
After harvest, olives must go through a curing process to make them edible. This process softens the olives and removes the bitter compounds that render them inedible.
Both salt and vinegar inhibit microbial growth, keeping the olives fresh and free of illness-causing bacteria. According to Food Safety, these small fruits can last for 12 to 18 months in the pantry if left unopened, but once you've opened the jar or can, you must refrigerate and eat them within two weeks.
within 24 hours of harvesting to ensure quality and freshness. Once an olive has fallen to the ground, it oxidizes much more quickly. Harvested olives must be brought to the mill as quickly as possible and pressed that same day to preserve their freshness.
Store in a cool, dark place for 40 days, then strain the brine out of the olive jars, reserving the olives. Make a fresh brine as above and pour the still hot brine over the olives again, before sealing the jars and storing in a cool, dark place for up to 6 months. They will be ready to eat after 3 weeks.
Olives contain a compound called oleuropein, which gives them their bitter taste. This compound needs to be leached out through a process of curing or fermentation before the olives become edible.
FAQs About Olive Oil Production from Olive Trees
Generally, the fruit from one healthy tree produces 3–7 litres. It takes about 5–7 kg of olives for just 1 litre of oil. How many trees are needed for family use? For a household using 20–30 litres of oil annually, 5–10 trees are usually enough.
A 25-year-old olive tree typically costs between $1,000 to $4,500 (USD/AUD), depending heavily on trunk girth, variety (like Frantoio, Manzanillo), container size (750L to 1000L bags), and visual appeal (e.g., sculptural, feature tree), with bulk purchases often lowering the per-tree price, and additional costs for delivery/installation.
Keep the olives submerged by weighing them down with a plate or a plastic bag filled with water. Place the container in a cool, dark place for at least ten days, draining the water and replacing it with fresh every day.
The curing of green olives with lye (a dilute solution of caustic soda) is popular in central and northern Italy. There are many varieties and sizes of olives, each of which has a different oil content. The best varieties to use for this method are the sevillano (Spanish queen), ascolani and manzanillo.
What kind of salt should I use to cure olives? Pickling or canning salt is ideal. It contains no additives and dissolves evenly for reliable and safe curing.
The olive trees are stripped at night because cool temperatures help to preserve the olives' aromatic compounds.
To ensure the best possible balance between fruit quantity and quality and production of beautiful Australian-grown EVOO, it's important you understand how to identify the prime harvest time for your crop. In Australia, olives are generally harvested anywhere from March until July.
Use a high-quality, free-draining potting mix with added sand or perlite to prevent waterlogging. Position the pot in full sun and water deeply when the soil feels dry. Potted olives benefit from a slow-release fertiliser in spring and occasional liquid feeds to encourage strong growth and fruiting.
Olive brine represents a stressful environment due to the high NaCl concentration, presence of phenolic compounds known as antimicrobials, and low availability of nutrients. Thus, only a few strains of lactic acid bacteria (LAB) are adapted to grow in and ferment table olives.
They provide us with vitamins A and E.
Vitamin A helps the skin and mucous membranes to stay supple, and improves our eyesight, while vitamin E is an antioxidant which helps to protect our cells against oxidative damage. This means that the vitamin E contained in olives helps to keep the body healthy and delays ageing.
Some packages of olives, due to different processing methods, may warn you about a shorter shelf life. Follow their instructions and eat these promptly! If you find yourself with olives that you're just not going to finish quickly, consider freezing them.
While they won't change color if they've spoiled, you should keep an eye out for mold. Fuzzy olives should be tossed immediately. On the other hand, should the liquid develop a layer of white film, don't fret. Simply scoop it off, add a splash of vinegar, and eat them as you normally would.
It's believed that the pimento, arguably the most popular olive stuffing, was used to cut the fruit's bitterness. Then as today, the higher-end olives are often meticulously hand-stuffed while the lower-end-but-still-delicious green olives are usually stuffed by a machine.