Collecting Olives

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I wrote about this in my other blog Corfu Chronicles, but thought it would be appropriate and of interest to readers here.

We went collecting olives this week. We have a few trees that have what are called Kalamon olives, which are the ones you eat rather than make into oil. You may be familiar with Greek Kalamata olives - Kalamata is a town and area in the Peloponnese, Greece - well, the Kalamon olives are that type.You collect these so-called "table" olives directly from the trees, rather than spread nets underneath, which is what you do with the olives that you use to make oil. We will be collecting those olives in January.


Here, you can see a bowl with some of the olives after they were picked. You don't eat them straight off the tree - they are far too bitter for that - but there is a simple process you put them through before they reach your table.

First of all, you discard the ones that are damaged or have been eaten by insects. Then you score them on two opposite sides with a razor blade (not a knife) or on three sides if they are large.

Having done that, you put them in a jar filled with water and change the water every day for 20 days.


We separated the larger olives (with 3 scores) from the others, and you can see them in water here. Once three weeks have passed, I'll post again explaining and showing how the olives are finally prepared to go on the table and get eaten!

2 comments:

Ken said...

This is very informative. I now eat olives whenever I can as part of my diet. There's an Italian store near me which sells different kinds. The inexpensive ones, would you believe, comes from South America!

Mizé said...

Congrats, your olives look really nice. It´s good to know how you store them.
My daughter loves the black but my favorite are small green type.
I use olive oil to cook almost everything, our extra virgin type is a god´s gift.
Cheers.

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