Preserving Olives and Climbing Trees - Part 2

Well folks, now we get to the good part!  Since my first post about harvesting my scant and rare crop of olives, I have been faithfully monitoring and brining them over the last 3 and a half weeks.  It has been wonderful watching them change colour and become softer and tastier every day.  For the first ten days or so, I changed the brine every day - i.e. I poured out the old brine, and then made up a new brine of 1 tablespoon of salt to each 250 mls of water and filled up the jar again with the fruit and the brine.  Summer is just not letting up here, and we have been having hot, steamy days over 30C relentlessly, day after day.  We are all beginning to droop!  I was getting a bit worried about my precious olives, and I noticed the tiniest bit of mould on the top of the jar.  Eek! I yelled to myself, and hurriedly rinsed out the jar and re-brined the olives.  Right I thought, from now on they go in the fridge.  So that is where they have been residing over the last couple of weeks, while I have waited anxiously to see if they would be ok.  While they were lolling about in the cool depths, I changed the brine every second day till the big day came at last.  Mr Pickings agreed that these little beauties were good enough to eat!  But they were salty I have to say, so I let them sit in cold plain water for 2 more days to dilute the somewhat too salty flavour.

Came the weekend and yes it was bottling day.  The olives were rinsed in water, then patted dry. Then came the fun bit - putting them into clean, sterilised jars (you know the drill; wash in hot, soapy water then into a low oven to dry for 20 mins.) and covering with extra virgin olive oil.  I can't wait to eat them!

pour them into a colander to drain the brine off 

drying off the fruit before packing in olive oil  

spooning the little darlings into their jars  

push them down under the oil  

topping off with the olive oil  

in they go!

all done  

Such a sense of satisfaction when you have jars of your own produce for the coming months.  It was interesting to see how the olives became less green or brown and became more uniformly the same. Also quite amazing that even after 3.5 weeks of brining, they still retained an oily taste and scent. Such a brilliant little fruit!