As autumn whispers into our days and nights, olives, someplace, are ripening. And that makes my mouth water in anticipation. Oil-cured olives await. My olive-curing adventures started this chilly January, once I was gifted a tiny, contemporary crop of ripe black olives by Rachel Prince, a proficient skilled gardener and buddy who lives two blocks west of us in Brooklyn. Rachel grows her little olive bushes in pots that overwinter indoors in our USDA rising zone 7b (-ish). I had at all times wished to make oil-cured—versus brined—olives, whose meaty, concentrated taste could be addictively good, for anybody who loves savory flavors. The outcomes, a few weeks later, have been surprisingly scrumptious, and the method couldn’t have been simpler.
All you’ll want to make oil-cured olives are salt, olives, and time. And perhaps a pillow slip.
As I examine the way to make oil-cured olives (beginning with this pleasant tutorial) I discovered shortly that the time period “oil-cured” is a misnomer—no oil is concerned within the curing course of. It’s extra correct to explain these wizened treats as dry-cured, or salt-cured. However the description appears to stay.
Rachel’s little cold-bletted olives have been much less bitter than most, however I nonetheless soaked them in a single day, then combined them with an equal weight of sea salt earlier than hanging them in a fabric from the ceiling (proper beside the annual hoshigaki), to remedy. Snow fell on the skylight above. After every week, I tasted one. Nonetheless mildly bitter. However only one week extra and the tiny olives have been prepared. I used to be delighted to find that they tasted—no less than to me—precisely as oil-cured olives ought to: savory and succulent, in a wrinkled manner.
A number of months later, in April and a hemisphere away, I discovered myself exterior Nieuwoudtville, South Africa, standing awed beside three 12-foot olive bushes whose silver-leafed branches have been weighed down with plump inexperienced and black fruit. They have been planted round our lodging, a 200-year-old farmstead that was our base for a once-in-a-lifetime journey to see the annual and breathtaking autumn show of Brunsvigia flowers within the veld across the city. Pomegranate bushes grew beside the olives, their ripe-to-bursting fruit splitting to reveal juicy purple gems. Rosemary in bloom clambered over a stone wall. In a phrase, heaven.
I remembered these dead-easy oil-cured olives in wintery Brooklyn, and I started to select.
Oil-cured olives recall two formative meals. One, the place, as an impressionable 20-year previous ready for a waiter-friend to complete his shift in a Turkish restaurant in Cape City, I discovered myself the stunned recipient of two plates, despatched from the kitchen to me by the intimidating chef. On a small plate was a slab of unadorned sheeps’ milk feta. The second plate contained nothing however shiny, oil-cured olives. I had by no means seen any earlier than. A diminutive carafe of purple wine arrived. It appeared shockingly austere, and I’ve by no means forgotten it (the chef went on to turn out to be a buddy and meals mentor; now 85, he lives in Istanbul).
The opposite indelible reminiscence is from Café Gitane, an indefatigable restaurant in Manhattan’s Nolita, the place, ten years after that gentle evening snack, I ate for lunch a startling salad of orange segments, oil-cured olives, and chile. It was served with a hunk of baguette, whose function was to sop up the complicated-tasting and soupy juice on the backside of the bowl. I’ve made that salad ever since, lately with shatta in addition to some mint, from our little terrace. The addition of house-cured olives makes it an much more satisfying pleasure.
These plump Niewoudtville olives travelled. First, again to our Cape City base, the place I hung them in a pillow slip from an iron café desk on the little terrace the place we have been staying. Then again to New York, in a ziplock, salt and all. At dwelling, in Brooklyn, they have been switched to a cotton kitchen fabric and hung for one more week till no extra moisture might be detected. On the twenty ninth day of their remedy, discovering that they tasted great, I rinsed them, allow them to dry, after which packed them in jars with—lastly!—a tablespoon of olive oil to gloss them up. I ate one just a few moments earlier than writing these phrases, and they’re as scrumptious as ever. Daring, succulent, barely chewy, and umami-ly compelling.
