Yes, I Harvested, Cured, Brined, and Ate Six Olives

I haven’t found growing food on my balcony terribly rewarding. Sometimes the yield is so teensy that I have to laugh, like when I harvested six single olives. 

I’ve already waxed poetic on how our time in Puglia last summer compelled us to get an olive tree for the balcony as soon as we got back. We chose a frantoio variety which came with green fruits dangling from its branches. 

The garden center staff warned us about olive fruit fly. This pest lays eggs in the olives, which hatch larvae that feed on the fruit from the inside out, ruining it for human consumption. 

You can identify spoiled fruit by a brown hole in the skin left by the females when they lay their eggs. Upon inspection of my already modest olive harvest in October, all but six showed the telltale puncture wound of doom. 

For reasons I can’t articulate, I stubbornly embarked on a months-long process to cure and brine those six olives in a tiny jar. Here’s how I did it.

Step 1: Water curing

Raw olives are extremely bitter thanks to the substance oleuropein. Somehow, people in the Mediterranean discovered that if you soak the olives long enough, they become edible. It seems like a lot of work for a snack, but I’m glad they figured it out.

I loosely followed these instructions combined with what I remembered of a conversation I had in Puglia with my husband’s aunt, Paola, who told me how she made her own olives. 

First, cure the olives in water. Make a small cut in each olive to ensure penetration. Place the olives in a shallow bowl (in my case, a ramekin), cover with filtered water, and place something weighty on top to keep them submerged. Refresh the water every day for one week.

Step 2: Salt brining

Curing removes most of the bitterness, while brining gives the olives their salty tang. Drain and place the olives in a sanitized, sealable container (in my case, a spice jar) and add a solution of one part salt to ten parts water. Store them in a cool, dark place.

I brined mine for three months, refreshing the brine once halfway through.

Step 3: Olive oil and aromatics

This step is optional but makes for a more delicious end product. Drain the olives, clean and dry the jar, put the olives back in, and refill it with olive oil and your choice of aromatics. I used home-grown thyme and a lemon peel.

I left my olives in their oily, aromatic bath, almost forgetting about them until a cabinet reorganization three months later resurfaced the tiny jar.

Step 4: Be brave and eat them!

I admit I was hesitant to eat something that had been sitting in my kitchen cabinet unrefrigerated for six months. But I figured that after all those steps, it would be a shame not to try them.

I opened the lid and took a sniff. No rancid odors. I spooned the olives out of the spice jar and inspected them. They looked like olives!

My first, tentative bite was tender and salty, not bitter, with a subtle citrus flavor. Genuine surprise came over me as I realized my olives were, in fact, quite good.

I ate three and left the other three for my husband, who waited a few days to make sure I didn’t die before risking his own life. This was the test: would someone from the region of 60 million olive trees like my olives?

His verdict: “They taste like Puglia!” We both agreed they were reminiscent of Zia Paola’s and the little olives that always accompany Pugliese antipasti, like bowls of shiny pebbles.

Was it worth all that effort for six delicious olives? Yes, because I learned how to process olives in a very low-stakes prototype. If I get the chance to do it on a more reasonable scale someday, I’ll know just what to do. And now so will you!