Finally, the olives are done!

Finally, after over three months the olives are finished.  (Click here to see original post) I was getting a little discouraged because the brining process was taking way longer then some of my original sources suggested, months longer in-fact.  Originally, I read on a few websites that brining would only take one month or so.  Well apparently that is very wrong, it takes much closer to three months for the salt method I described on the original post.  I did however find an excellent paphlet produced by the University of California.

The pamphlet can be found here: Olives: safe methods for home pickling

This free pamphlet has all the detailed information you would need for a variety of different types of olive processing.  If you choose to process olives be sure to follow their directions closely and carefully.

As for my finished product I would have to say it is pretty good and the experiment a success.  I do think the olives are a little mushy and have a little bit of a washed out flavor though.  Both of these are likely a result of brining for a few weeks too long.  Next time I will be sure to stick close to the University of California methods now that I am familiar with them.
 

Here are my fresh olives soaking in a ~10% sea salt solution on the first day of the experiment.

Here are the finished olives three months later soaking in a ~5% salt, 25% vinegar solution with the juice of two lemons, garlic and chili peppers added for flavor.

Some of the finished olives.

So after draining the olives from the brining solution I put them in a 5% sea salt, 25% white vinegar solution with the juice of two lemons, two cloves of sliced garlic and dried chili peppers mixed in for flavoring.

Foraging the city: Olives

Olives will be ripening now through December in the Sonoran Desert.  So yesterday I took a trip to Encanto Park in downtown Phoenix to see if I could find any olives ready for harvesting.  At the park I found several olive trees ready for harvest.  Olives develop on the tree green and as they ripen their color changes to a reddish-purple color and then finally to black.  They are best to harvest just before they turn black.  Olives grow amazingly well in the desert and are a huge food crop that largely goes unnoticed by the general desert dwelling public.  Very few people actually do anything but be annoyed by and try to get rid of this abundant food source in Phoenix.  So, being that olives are one mans trash, I hope to make that mans trash into a delicious olive treasure.  So I picked three pounds of nice plump reddish-purple olives right off the tree.  The problem and reason why olives are largely considered annoying trash is that if you were to bite into one right off the tree it would be disgusting.  Unprocessed olives contain a bitter compound called oleuropein which makes them unpalatable.  It is so disgusting that if you taste an unprocessed olive once you will never do it again.  (Yes, I speak from experience.)

 One of the olive trees I collected three pounds of olives from in Encanto Park.

In order to make a disgusting olive into a tasty one we must fist brine and ferment it for at least a month.  Both interesting biological processes in themselves.  First the olives were rinsed off and a small cut made on one side of them.  The cut allows for the brine to access the inside of the olive easier and can speed up processing by a few months.  Once all the olives were cleaned and cut, they were placed in a one gallon jar and submerged in an 8% sea salt solution to brine and ferment them.  A weight must be placed on top of the olives so they will not float to the top (We used a one-gallon ziplock bag filled with water to weigh the olives down).  The salt solution will flush the oleuropein out the olives, kill bad bacteria, and allow for lactic acid fermentation to take place.  Lactobacillus sp. bacteria carry out this fermentation and process some of the oleuropein into more tasteful substances.  Once a week for three to four weeks the salt brine must be replaced with fresh brine.  At week three taste an olive, if it don't taste good to you brine it for another week.  At week three or four, or when the olives taste good, drain the olives of the brine and replace it with a flavored vinegar brine.  We will discuss this process and the final vinegar brine more when this batch of olives is done in about a month.
 

My jar of brining and fermenting olives.  Olives were cleaned, cut on one side, then submerged in an 8% sea salt solution.  To keep the olives submerged they were weighed down with a water filled zip-lock bag.  The opening to the container was covered with plastic wrap to prevent any contamination.