Home cured olives

After reading this blog about home curing olives, I just couldn't get it out of my head. We love olives around here and buy huge tubs of them at the Costco. It reminded me as well, of these olives we always buy when we go back to Italy each year. Chaffin Family Orchard is where I bought the raw olives from. I also bought some olive oil from them, but that won't come in until January or so. If you go to the blog I mentioned above, she has a great tutorial for curing olives. The Chaffin website also has a link on how to do it. I'll just show you some pictures.

Since the olives come in a 20 pound box, I have several opportunities to try out different methods of curing. This first one you see in the pictures is water curing. You basically crack the olives with a mallet then put them in a bucket of water. Let them sit overnight, changing the water everyday until the bitterness goes away, about 6-7 days. Then you put them in a jar and add the brine. Place the jars in the fridge and after 4 days they should be eatable.

These three jars are 1/2 gallon jars. Believe it or not, there are 10 pounds of olives in those jars! Next I'm going to try brine curing. It's really similar to lactic fermentation. It takes a lot longer to process though, about 4 months. As I just put these in the fridge today, I don't know what they taste like yet. Though I will let you know in 4 days time!