Remember the classic argument about tomatoes? Are they a fruit or are they a vegetable? Well, the same argument can be had about olives. Olives are a fruit. They have a stone, or pit, inside, like peaches and cherries. Unlike those fruits, though, olives have a low sugar content.
I’m told that when you eat olives, certainly you’re getting a low-sugar portion of your fruit servings for the day. Right? But they do have a lot of oil.
Olives that have not been cured taste really, really awful. So let’s get down to it.
What Makes An Olive An Olive?
From this website comes an explanation of how olives are cured.
Fully ripe olives can be fermented in brine (salt water), but it takes a long time, up to a year. This makes the olive sweeter, because the fruit flavor is intensified.
The kind of cure that takes the longest time is water curing. Olives are soaked and rinsed. Repeat and repeat and repeat. Some producers start with this cure, then move to brine.
Olives can also be packed in salt for a month or longer. This pulls out moisture and bitterness. Sometimes, after removal from the salt, the olives are drenched in olive oil to keep them plump. If you see an oil-cured olive, it is actually a dry-cured olive that is softened in oil for several months.
Large processors use lye-curing. It is the most time- and cost-effective method. It is fast, but it leaves behind a sad, bland olive.
In rare instances, olives are sun and air cured on the tree or, after picking, by laying in the sun.
Have You Been Eating Olives Wrong?
From this site comes a new way of looking at this fruit, and I have included the narrative, not in total, but enough to give you a fabulous recipe.
To explore the new world of possibilities, [the writer] decided to make sautéed olives from Susie Theodorou’s new cookbook, Mediterranean, as well as Salad in a Jar’s recipe for “Warm and Toasty Nuts with Rosemary and Shallots” (which originally appeared in Martha Stewart’s Hor D’oeuvres Handbook).
I started with the nuts. (In retrospect, this was a mistake — as I later discovered, the olives hold their heat longer.) First, as per Martha’s recipe, I preheated the oven to 350 degrees, and then poured some cashews, pecans, and almonds into a cake pan … and toasted them for 10 minutes.
Next, I sliced two shallots and three cloves of garlic lengthwise, and then fried them in olive oil until they were brown, for about four minutes. Because we had run out of paper towels, I set them to dry on a torn up brown paper bag, which worked okay.
I then melted two tablespoons of unsalted butter and mixed in ¼ cup of fresh, chopped rosemary, ¼ teaspoon of cayenne pepper, a tablespoon of brown sugar, and a tablespoon of salt, then poured the mixture over the warm nuts and stirred in the shallots and garlic.
The result was incredible.
Finally, I [made] the olives. I chose to use Castelvetrano olives, because Theodorou wrote that the “plump, pale green olive from Sicily is very much in vogue right now, and with its fleshy texture and briny flavour, it’s one of my favorites to use in recipes.”
To sauté them, I poured a couple of tablespoons of olive oil into the frying pan, heated it up, then added the olives and a sprig of rosemary. Theodorou suggests to “cook until they plump up” but mine didn’t seem to change size that much, so I cooked them for three to four minutes, taking them off the heat once I noticed the skin of several olives beginning to blister.
I poured the olives, the nuts, and crackers into some bowls, and sat down to enjoy them, by myself…. The sautéing made the olives’ flesh softer, silkier, and cooking them in olive oil brightened and enhanced their flavor. They were delightful.
It felt sumptuous, decadent, to have taken the time and made this for myself. And while it was difficult to face the reality that I had theretofore been living a half-life, with plain old room-temperature olives and nuts, at least now my future looked brighter, and much warmer.
But What About Martinis & Bloody Marys?
I found several sites talking about “the best” olives for these drinks, but I didn’t want to start World War III. Google or Bing it!!!
In Closing
Olives are a wonderful food, and should have a food category of their own, like bacon and chocolate.